Imagine my surprise to open the Enterprise (I was building a fire) and discover that not one, but two assistant superintendents for the Edmonds School District have acknowledged that student enrollment is actually decreasing. If they read the 2004-2009 Capital Facilities Plan, adopted by the Board on October 5, 2004, they would have known that a decrease was coming. They could have made adjustments to programming and budgets, slowly and over time.Ellen Kahan is quoted as saying, "Enrollment is expected to continue to decline in the district as a whole."
Marla Miller is quoted as saying, "We will need to make some reductions every year as enrollment declines unless we get an influx of additional funding."
4 comments:
Even without the capital facilities plan, the budget office should have never recommended a forecast they knew was too high. It doesn't take a master's degree (that would be an MPA from UW) to look at trends and know the risks involved in overprojecting. Or maybe they did know what they are doing? Creating an atmosphere of panic? Refusing to bargain with the unions? I smell another rat.
Why go through all that work when Marla can go to the board and ask them to ask the taxpayers for more money or keep the level of levy monies they are getting now? It is way to easy for the school district to just ask the taxpayer and threaten that the class sizes will bet larger and sports will be cut this way of bully the taxpayers for more money for student education.
Although it is generally agreed that a new Lynnwood High School is long overdue, extended consideration should be made to its long-term function given the potential of falling attendance. Further, why consolidate transportation and the ESC at a new location and move the Scriber Lake alternative program to such a large building currently occupied by the ESC when that use could easily be absorbed into the existing schools with space opening up in the near future? Transportation could have moved to the old Cedar Valley site alone and the purchase of the adjoining property would never have had to have been made. I think it is unclear whether there exists any real future potential here in investment for the District. What are the plans for the old Woodway High School site? - it is an excellent location and I would like to hope that the District can hold on to the property, or make some share agreement the the City of Edmonds for community and sports facility use.
It just seems odd to me that when the discussion of moving ESC, Maint. and Trasp. to the old CV site no mention was made of the need for additional land. So when was it decided that we needed more land? The plan always was to move all support levels to one site so what happened was the site too small?
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