Or is that supposed to end Panama? The sixth community feedback meeting was held last night at Paxon School for Advanced Studies (my last stop in my teaching career), District 5. Among the attendees were persons advocating for Fishweir Elementary, Young Women’s Leadership Academy/Young Men’s Leadership Academy (Butler Middle), Thomas Jefferson Elementary, Westside High, Raines High, and West Riverside Elementary. Maybe also some Stockton Elementary parents? I didn’t write them down so I may have left some out.

The meeting began with an overview of the process to come. Public input via an online link (go here) will end Friday; the last community meeting will be Thursday evening in District 1 at Terry Parker High School. Afterwards, summer focus groups will take the community feedback on the original draft and work on revisions. A representative from each school (probably someone from the School Advisory Committee,) community members chosen by board members, and other experts will be used to form the groups.

In the fall, district staff will take the work of the focus groups and use it to create a new iteration of a plan. They will bring a final recommendation to the school board, who expects to vote on it in November.

Dana Kriznar, interim superintendent, described what led to the district hiring a consultant to analyze the situation and recommend changes:

• Two-thirds of schools are under 85% of their capacity.
• 28 schools are under 50% of their capacity.
• 20 schools are under 300 students in their enrollment.
• Every school has fixed costs regardless of the enrollment (think electricity, maintenance, administration). Smaller schools have to use proportionately more of their base student funding (FTE) for these costs. That impacts class sizes and program offerings at the schools.
• Recent operational budgets have been using federal Covid money and reserves to make up shortfalls. Also, the district has cut positions and increased class sizes to remain in balance.
• Reserves have fallen to minimal levels required by the state. Covid funding ends in September. Also, declining enrollment brings less FTE funding from the state. (Implication: these past strategies are no longer effective. More drastic changes are needed. It’s more than a question of increasing construction costs for the Master Facilities Plan (MFP); the district cannot afford to operate all the schools it currently does.)

Thus, Dr. Kriznar continued, we hired a consultant to develop a proposal with these criteria:

• School boundaries
• Improve low utilization of facilities
• Sensible feeder patterns from elementary to middle to high school
• Maximize efficiency

Not considered in the plan:

• Special programs such as those for ESE students, career technical education
• School commuting patterns and general traffic patterns (for example, would a proposed change cause children to have to cross busy city highways)

With that lead-in, she asked the audience, “What makes your school special? That’s what we need to know.”

Kriznar also mentioned that the district is working to lower construction costs by looking at other types of school designs that are not as expensive, reducing the pace of construction because a one or two year rebuild involves higher labor costs for contractors, and moving more contracted services in-house for DCPS employees to provide.

She ended with a plea for everyone to help recapture enrollment by talking up the district and, in particular, their school.

A representative for the consultant then described the attributes they examined to create their proposed plan: identifying where students live, enrollment trends in neighborhoods, and the condition of the facilities.

Darryl Willie, this year’s chair, wrapped up this part, “We’re not deaf. Your comments are coming up in our workshops [as we talk about the plan.]”

Extra factoids gleaned from the Question and Answer time:

• They’re trying to find a balance between maximizing efficiency (least amount of operating costs) and providing the facilities and amenities desired.
• The benefit of a larger elementary school is that they have more resources and programming. Maintaining smaller schools means that resources have to be taken from the larger schools to subsidize the smaller schools.
• The optimal size of a school is not the same for all schools.
• The operating deficit for next year (24 – 25) is 41 million dollars.
• Capital dollars such as the half-penny sales tax cannot be used for operations.
• The time frame for when consolidation and closing of schools will take place and how it will happen has not been determined.
• New facilities already built are attracting enrollment back into the system.
• The school location into which others will be consolidated could change.

The above is an informative summary. I didn’t record anything from the public comment period. My hope is that those who didn’t go to a meeting get an idea of what the district said about the MFP and the why of what they want to do. Thus, I have refrained from opining about what was said. I’ll do that in a follow-up post.

A man, a plan, master facilities, Panama! Nope, the palindrome isn’t quite there yet and neither is the MFP revision, which is a complete rethinking of the district and how it structures itself.