Education Forward

You will never read about the most important thing going on in Manassas in any newspaper.  Which is another way of saying that the Education Forward committee met on Saturday morning.  Dr. Pope presented a list of changes for our consideration.  Here’s that list in its entireity:

1.  Touch Time
    a.  Decrease class size to 18:1.  Currently somewhere around 25:1
    b.  Mandate a 200 day school year which would be longest in state

2.  Best Facilities
    a.  Replace old buildings/infrastructure
    b.  Upgrade to state of the art sciene labs, libraries, etc.

3.  Dramatically alter programmatic structure
    a.  City wide k-8 school of choice (kind of like pennington)
    b.  City wide k-4 school of choice
    c.  K-12 International Baccalaureate Program
    d.  Day long pre-K for all 4 year olds
    e.  Every graduate earns an associate’s degree from NOVA
    f.  STEM Academy as a school within a school

4.  Education technology leader in the state
    a.  Electronic textbooks
    b.  Notebooks/tablets for every student
    c.  Partner with NVTC

5.  Increased Expectations
    a.  A city that expects success: Council, School Boards, Superintendent
    b.  Mandatory Uniforms
    c.  Parental involvement

Here are my thoughts on this list: First and foremost, it is precisely what we’ve been looking for: a list of options, some of which are a reach and some more modest.  It is important to note that some of the items on the list, if selected, necessarily exlude other choices.  You wouldn’t do 3(a) and 3(b) for instance.  Many if not all of these options will require money.  Some will require quite a lot of it.

Just as a for-example: Reducing the student-teacher ratio (which seems to be a fairly direct and well-understood route to increasing performance) would be very expensive.  A quick back of the envelope calculation would seem to require we hire 40 teachers (I could be wildly wrong!).  Assuming they make an average of $50k (which is likely low) that would be $2 million a year in salary.  I don’t know what the schools overhead rate is but say it’s 30% and your loaded labor cost is $2.6 million.  They’ll also need some place to teach.  Say you can build the necessary facilities for $20 million.  That’s $2 million a year in debt service.  That’s $4.6 million a year but that number is a wild guess and could be off by 50%!.  Assuming it’s $4.6, that’s 12.5 cents on the property tax rate if we find no other way to pay for it (renting space, etc).  This is serious business.

The committee has asked Dr. Pope to do some rough order of magnitude costing and an idea of impact for each item.  We also asked her to work with the City Manager in order to come up with a proposal for a unified communications strategy.  We’ll meet in early December to review the new information and make some selections.