I apologize for my delay in responding to Lisa Ross and others who have asked questions in response to my recent postings here.
I believe that runaway residential growth, triggered primarily by our City Council's reckless annexation policy, is the greatest single problem facing our school district and our community. Our elected officials should be doing everything in their power to slow residential growth to a rate that we can manage. Instead our City Council actually is offering builders incentives. I find this incredible.
The negative impact that this residential growth is having on our schools is readily apparent in the modular classrooms clustered around our existing schools. These modular classrooms are difficult to secure, expensive to buy and expensive to heat, and have short shelf lives. I am told that they ordinarily last only ten years, and are ''portable'' in name only. Assuming that what I have been told by our school district administration is true (which, unfortunately, I have sometimes found to be a big assumption), it costs nearly as much to move one of these units as it does to buy one, and once they are moved they start to disintegrate.
Our school district's administrators keep telling me, when they ask the school board to buy more of these things, that there is an active resale market for them. But when I ask why we are not buying used ones, they tell me that no sensible school district would do that. Thus, if we ever reach a point where we no longer need them, I see little hope of recovering their cost.
Moreover, placing students in these units does little to relieve overcrowding, because the libraries, lavatories, gyms, lunchrooms and other common facilities in our schools cannot handle the added students. I believe we have high school students eating lunch at 10:00 am.
As enrollments increase, students, teachers and staff start to become strangers, discipline problems grow, and opportunities to participate in plays, varsity athletics and other extra-curricular activities become scarce. Teachers and administrators must devote more and more of their time to crowd control.
Growth increases the number of additional teachers we must hire which, in turn, requires us to dip ever deeper into a contracting applicant pool. This has to reduce the overall quality of the new teachers we hire.
Growth also increases our tax burden, because the additional tax revenues that growth generates does not cover the additional expenses it creates.
(to be continued)
By Bruce Rigelman
I believe that runaway residential growth, triggered primarily by our City Council's reckless annexation policy, is the greatest single problem facing our school district and our community. Our elected officials should be doing everything in their power to slow residential growth to a rate that we can manage. Instead our City Council actually is offering builders incentives. I find this incredible.
The negative impact that this residential growth is having on our schools is readily apparent in the modular classrooms clustered around our existing schools. These modular classrooms are difficult to secure, expensive to buy and expensive to heat, and have short shelf lives. I am told that they ordinarily last only ten years, and are ''portable'' in name only. Assuming that what I have been told by our school district administration is true (which, unfortunately, I have sometimes found to be a big assumption), it costs nearly as much to move one of these units as it does to buy one, and once they are moved they start to disintegrate.
Our school district's administrators keep telling me, when they ask the school board to buy more of these things, that there is an active resale market for them. But when I ask why we are not buying used ones, they tell me that no sensible school district would do that. Thus, if we ever reach a point where we no longer need them, I see little hope of recovering their cost.
Moreover, placing students in these units does little to relieve overcrowding, because the libraries, lavatories, gyms, lunchrooms and other common facilities in our schools cannot handle the added students. I believe we have high school students eating lunch at 10:00 am.
As enrollments increase, students, teachers and staff start to become strangers, discipline problems grow, and opportunities to participate in plays, varsity athletics and other extra-curricular activities become scarce. Teachers and administrators must devote more and more of their time to crowd control.
Growth increases the number of additional teachers we must hire which, in turn, requires us to dip ever deeper into a contracting applicant pool. This has to reduce the overall quality of the new teachers we hire.
Growth also increases our tax burden, because the additional tax revenues that growth generates does not cover the additional expenses it creates.
(to be continued)
By Bruce Rigelman
