School enrollment: Show me the numbers.
Meaningful dialogue regarding School District student population has to move beyond mere personal preferences, memories, emotions and politics.
It has to be driven by what is best for the education of our children.
Assuming that everyone has this purpose in mind, a baseline of information must be established upon which all parties have knowledge.
Unfortunately, the prior School Board and Administration must have found themselves preoccupied for these past six years as they failed to provide answers to the following questions ,without which an informed discussion becomes difficult.
1. What is the legal capacity of each classroom at each school site?
a. There is the “developers’ report,” which gives a legal answer that impacts the amount of money the Culver City Redevelopment Agency gives to the School District.
b. A ruling by the Fire Marshal upon inspection, which has probably never occurred.
c. The actual number of desks each classroom is capable of holding.
2. What is the academically desirable number of students per classroom?
a. Per grade per site?
b. Per course or program at Middle/High School?
3. What are the current numbers of students per grade/site/program?
Some of these numbers can be tricky, particularly at Middle and High School where the number of course offerings and the range of students from remedial to advanced can make optimum numbers difficult to nail down.
With approximately 90% of the unrestricted budget going to wages and benefits, little is left to pay for programs.
And programs do not exist without qualified teachers along with support staff to run them.
Public school systems receive an “allowance” from the state based on the average daily attendance of students of about $39 per day.
4. What programs are offered at each site and grade?
5. What is the cost of these programs?
a. Staff costs?
b. Overhead costs?
6. How many students per site, per grade, per program are necessary to fiscally maintain each program?
Unfortunately, these are not new questions.
I have been asking for these answers at both Community Budget Advisory Committee meetings and School Board meetings for six years.
Perhaps now, with a new Superintendent and a new School Board configuration, some light could be shed on these issues.
We might well not have reached our physical capacity, but we might have exceeded our optimum educational capacity.
We might discover that the optimum educational capacity would require losing too many programs and teachers than would be good for academic excellence.
We might discover a way to do it all.
Let’s hope the School District comes forth with meaningful information in the coming months so our School Board can set real policy directives reflecting a consensus of the community which all will understand.
Mr. Elmont was a School Board candidate last year.
