School Construction Bond Issue
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Dweezil Dwarftosser f4...@yahoo.com
Do you know that many new-hire teachers were layed off after the first ten days of school this year (WakeCounty)
- because of declining enrollment?
(Even in Cary, which had been leading the pack in growth for many years.) Last year, a new high school in Apex (technically Cary) opened up at one-fourth capacity... and even then, they had to import many kids from Garner HS, against their will, just to fill a few cl***rooms.
The bozos at the central office don't recognize that as the jobs left the area, the students leave soon afterward.
Clueless.
Vote NO on this tax-raising boondoogle.
Dweezil Dwarftosser f4...@yahoo.com
In this forum, all I can say is that a teacher in a Cary middle school which I know very well had been all upset in August (before school opened) because some of the cl***es were expecting up to 38 students. They had a hard time obtaining more desks. Two more teachers had been hired by the school than necessary (above replacements for retirement, etc. School started, and the extra (growth) kids didn't show up. At day ten of school (when the county reports student population for payment from the state), the two new teachers were let go; there weren't enough students to fill their cl***es.
While there may be a few schools at or above capacity, it is a *local* problem, unique to a popular or well-located school. Rest ssured: the bunglers on Wake Forest Road will find a way to piss off the parents in that school when they redraw the ***ignment plan for next year, and cut out your or your neighbor's kid, bussing them across town to one of the nearly empty schools.
Important enough to say again!
Dave Christian dcn...@nc.rr.com
I can find nothing about this. Can you please post a source?
McQualude mcqual...@hoohoo.com
Dave Christian spaketh...
His evidence is anecdotal, two teachers at his kid's school got cut.
I did find this: http://www.wcpss.net/perl/job_listings/job_lister.pl Not that big of a list, but not insignificant.
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McQualude
Dweezil Dwarftosser f4...@yahoo.com
Take out the Special Ed teachers (always in shortage), and half the list disappears. Take out the Social Workers, Guidance Specialists, Administrators, and other non-teachers (even though the teacher's union requires them to have taken "education" courses) and the list shrinks another 25%.
What remains are just about enough teachers to fill the openings from normal attrition in a non-growing student population.
Thomas Goodwin ucct...@unc.edu
Well. I called up the Wake County Public Schools and they said that as of this week, enrollment is up by 4,100 over last year.
McQualude mcqual...@hoohoo.com
Dweezil Dwarftosser spaketh...
That list contained teachers only, there are seperate lists for teaching ***istants, administrators, support staff, etc. Point taken about the special ed, though.
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McQualude
Tom Disque Tom.Dis...@sas.com
Wow! You just Goodwinned this thread! :-) _ "My opinions, not SAS Institute's" Tom Disque
wdu ...@fw.private.neotoma.org
Do you don't have any valid information on the overall conditon of wake county school populations of students or teachers huh? Just your typical anecdotal evidence made up by a closed mind.
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Wes Dukes (wdukes.pobox@com) Swap the . and the @ to email me please.
s...@www.spam.com is a garbage address.
wdu ...@fw.private.neotoma.org
That equates to at least 100 teachers. Again dweeber is full of hot air.
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Wes Dukes (wdukes.pobox@com) Swap the . and the @ to email me please.
s...@www.spam.com is a garbage address.
Dweezil Dwarftosser f4...@yahoo.com
Just try getting some stats out of WCPSS without threatening a lawsuit; it won't happen. (Back in '93, we tried to get the bottom line budget figure and student population of ANY "traditional" school AND any similar-sized "year-round" school for a dollars-per-pupil comparison. Not available. The only thing we DID get out of them was where they got their projected growth estimate: Triangle J council - a business growth-promoting group. No, it didn't come from the census bureau... and you can bet their current projections don't either.) The Triangle is in decline (or at best, static) in growth today.
The real estate folks or construction industry groups could give a good indication of how bad it is - but won't. (Nor would I expect them to do so; it would be bad for business.)
Dweezil Dwarftosser f4...@yahoo.com
Look again at the teacher list: about a quarter of it is social workers, guidance counselors, and the like.
They also stuff their Central Office featherbedding openings in there, (usually called some nemonic, like "CIC", "ILT coordinator", etc.) so that few better-qualified individuals will find and apply for these "gravy" jobs - and possibly displace the already-chosen friend from their buddy list.
The only good thing about this method is that it gets some near-retirement DUD teachers out of a cl***room where they can no longer bore the shit out of the kids, teaching them NOTHING. (In the service we called them "ROADies" - because they were Retired On Active Duty...)
Don_Shoema ...@HotMail.com (DonS)
I've always thought year-round was less expensive, on a per-student, per day cost. Can you point to any studies, web sites, etc, with more data on this ?
Thanx....don
Dweezil Dwarftosser f4...@yahoo.com
Yes, I can (see second post) - but they are general in nature, rather than specific about Wake County.
"Year-round school" (YRS) SHOULD be less expensive, but isn't, the way Wake County handles it.
I'm afraid that it has been a long time since this was a "hot topic" in the Triangle (1993-94), when the arguments were well-aired in the N&O, local TV news reports, and in the days when the public meetings of the school board permitted discussion items from citizens on the floor.
(I sometimes wonder if the hard-to-answer questions of those days to the embarrased school board wasn't the reason that they no longer permit such things. Many times, there was "film at eleven" that evening on local newscasts - devastating the board's ill-concieved plans publicly.) For the most part, it was the "pre-internet" days.
Wake invests a lot of money to ensure citizens think of YR schools as "magnet schools" (in upscale neighborhoods) even though their only draw is exclusivity; the nine weeks on, three weeks off schedule is attractive to some, but certainly not all.
For example (four track school, the most efficient): - Bus routes can never be more than 3/4 full; 25% of the students are "off-track" (on mini-vacation) at any time.
- Bus routes travel much farther (e.g. - SE Raleigh to Morrisville) for YR schools, since the mandatory 15% minority/disadvantaged representation is hard to obtain with local children.
- The school "dormancy" period - when the building is occupied ONLY by a few administrators (usually half the day) shrinks to only two-three weeks in the summer.
Thus, the HVAC, lighting, water, and sewer bills are higher than a traditional school. (242 school days total, versus 180 days.) - Staff costs are considerably higher for additional "enrichment" and "intercession" teachers and support staff, and because a one-deep position requires hiring a second person to cover those cl***es in school when the main person is "off track".
- Extravagance in new YRS buildings (virtually unique to Wake County): Presumably done to make YRS more attractive to parents, schools newly-built to house a YRS have some striking (and costly) features which do not add to academics at all: elaborate, vaulted entrances; expensive artworks in the hallways, and low, *fixed* cl***-size limitations.
(Traditional schools cannot turn away new in-district students like YRS does. Cl*** size grows from 24 to 28 to 32 and more during the year... without affecting the quality of education.) YRS with fewer tracks (2 or 3) are even more inefficient
- but single-track YRS are directly competitive with traditional.
There are raging arguments about the quality comparisons of education under YRS vs. traditional calendars, too - with virtually none of the YRS schools measuring up to the claims made for the system by YRS proponents, but that's a different can of worms.
The ONLY real comparison that can be made on costs in Wake YRS vs.
traditional is EXPENDITURE PER PUPIL, in schools serving about the same number of students. (Required, so that the economy of scale is the same.) And that's the one thing the WCPSS doesn't want known. The reason why this is kept "close to their chest" is obvious.
Dweezil Dwarftosser f4...@yahoo.com
Google is your friend, containing 1,280,000 "year round schools cost" links.
http://www.bctf.bc.ca/ResearchReports/95ei02/ "AVOIDANCE OF CONSTRUCTION COSTS. No matter which year-round plan is adopted, the chief reason for converting to YRE is to avoid the cost of building a new school. Expenses would be incurred for building design, engineering, construction, and furnishing, as well as for infrastructure reconstruction (streets, sewers, water, utilities, furniture). " "OPERATING COSTS. A school on a year-round calendar has students in attendance for approximately 242 days each year (Brekke, 1992). Clearly, keeping a YRE school open incurs a greater overall cost than maintaining the same school for only 180 days. Maintenance, repair, and utility expenses increase; and secretaries, custodians, cafeteria personnel, nurses, counselors, bus drivers, and other staff must be available for the full 12 months, with a proportionate increase in salary.
Principals' workloads increase, sometimes requiring districts to hire vice-
principals to handle the increased administrative load." [ NOTE: individual students still attend only 180 days under YRS - but the school is in use 242 days. ] "Year-round scheduling is not the only, or the least expensive, cost-cutting option for financially strapped school districts with growing student populations. Other measures, such as double sessions or the use of temporary structures, may prove to be cheaper." "School districts that respond to temporary increases in enrollment by constructing new buildings run a serious risk of costly over-building, since "[l]ong after the increase in enrollment has p***ed, the community probably will still be paying off the bonds for the new school construction" (Alvarez, Fraser, & Durante, 1994)." http://www.summermatters.com "Returns on investment in year-round schools Year-round schools cost taxpayers considerably more in: 1) higher utility bills to cool cl***rooms in summer 2) added administrative costs and for wear and tear on buildings 3) added costs for additional instructional days from remediation sessions that occur during frequent vacation breaks throughout the year.
4) added costs for administration salaries and support staff.
The findings in the North Carolina study, the largest and most credible comparison of the effects of calendar change to date, cast doubt on the value of spending money for year-round school "intersessions." North Carolina made additional instructional days mandatory in a majority of its year-round schools. But the test scores show that spending more money for more cl***room seat time with more of the same kind of instruction clearly is not the way to improve education." http://www.summermatters.com/whatsnew.htm "A comparison study by the Boyer Center, a not-for-profit group based at Messiah College, found no better test scores or school attendance for the York City year-round students than for traditional calendar students.
[...] The Boyer Groups also told the school board that placing all York City district schools on a year-round calendar would cost about 20 percent more." http://www.geocities.com/weswalker99/yrsna.htm "After five years of mandatory year-round schools, the Los angeles School Board scrapped the controversial year-round calendar in all but one of its 544 single-track, year-round schools after parents and administrators voted to return to the traditional calendar. The year-round calendar cost $4.2 million per year to implement and education returns were insignificant.
(Los Angeles Times, 5/28/93)" "Several California year-round school districts, including Oxnard, report that operating costs per year-round student do not even reach the "break-even" point with costs per students on traditional schedules unless the year-round school operates multi-track and increases student capacity to 115%. the cost per student does not decline until the year-round school capacity exceeds 120%.
(Weppner Report, Florida Atlantic University)" "Richard Johnson, ***istant superintendent of schools in Loudon County, VA says "We found we were spending more money operationally than anybody had ever anticipated. We were hiring people to cover problems we could not solve administratively. That goes counter to everything that proponents of year-round schooling will tell you. We tried our level best to make it work, and we couldn't do it."
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