Elementary space: Part 1 -through the lens distortedly

Putting aside such controversial issues as (cough, cough) capacity for a minute...how does one decide when more space is needed?  Does a young couple, dreaming of oodles of babies decide to move from their one bedroom apartment and buy a 5-bedroom house?  Maybe...if they're rich.     Or are such decisions better made closer to reality...such as when bun #2 is baking in the oven, is it time to move from a 2 bedroom home to a 3-bedroom home?   Similarly, does a school district which sits at 79% of "capacity" decide it's time to build a school?  Or do they look for some untested measure of "capacity" which supports a much higher percentage of capacity?  Doesn't part of this district's mission say something about making decisions based on data?  It would seem that we need to add a modifier there, language geeks.  Perhaps an adjective?  Maybe..."accurate"..."reliable"?  How about tossing in an adverb for good measure.  Maybe our motto needs to be something more like, "We only make decisions based on accurate and reliable data?  There...THAT changes the flavor nicely.

...bored now

Of course, that opening salvo will start phones ringing tomorrow morning...if not sooner...and some poor blogger is gonna wind up in someone's doghouse.  You know what?  So. Be. It.  Not caring here.  We're with Dark Willow...we're bored now.  Shackles and gags don't work very well for us.  Because, in the end, we err on the side of more information.  We believe in getting the data out there and letting the community decide.   Hell, our beloved local newspaper and official newspaper of the school district, the STAR, doesn't publish anything until it's said and done, brewing and controversial, or unless they read some twisted message into something that has no bearing on truth.  Anything to sell newspapers you know.  Credible journalism is not affected by the fact that a newspaper is shrinking in terms of both number and size of its pages, right?

Where are we going with this?  Well....we have a school board approved timeline for building elementary school #8.  Of course that decision was made deep within the black box that is SPASD administration.  We have no information on HOW they reached that conclusion...although our guess is "because it's what's best for the kids".  But, with all that said, according to the school board approved timeline, we should be well on our way to selecting a site on which to build this 8th elementary school to open September 2015.  In order to toss a couple of boulders on the track to slow this train down, we offer the first of three key concepts:


#1 Building a new school based on unrealized projections is just plain wrong. 
How do we know when it's time to build a new school?  Well..seeing as the UW APL projections for growth keep getting tossed out at us, it would seem that's a big part of the black box source code.  That being said, let us be perfectly clear.  As our governor would likely point out, the APL projections are but a single tool to maintain a complex machine.  They are mathematical projections based on actual enrollment and birth data.  What cannot be so easily converted to mathematical functions, however are petty little annoyances like 4-year long recessions, a weak housing market, foreclosures, and rapidly declining home values.  Oh....and maybe a new governor.

So...according to projections,  we need to build an 8th elementary school to open by the fall of 2015.  Those projections assume that we will add 547 additional elementary school kids in the next 4 years.   Certainly, if we increase the number of elementary school-aged children by  18% in 4 years, then we will be VERY tight on space.

But this isn't FairyTale land.  And our elementary "growth" over the past FIVE (not four) years has been 271 kids....or roughly half of growth projected for the next 4 years.  The APL projection is that this fall, for the 2012-13 school year, we will add just under 300 total students, of which 109 will be K-5 kids.  That's funny, because in the budget projections trotted out by Phil Frei, an increase of only 120 TOTAL kids is planned.  So even administration has some doubts about the accuracy of the APL projections.  Over the last 10 years, elementary school kids have represented, on average, 45.8% of the total district enrollment.  And this number has been pretty solid: the lowest percent was 43.8 and the highest was 47.9%.  That means that Mr. Frei's budget projection of 120 new kids translates to about 55 new K-5 students.  And that's a pretty far cry from the 109 new K-5 kids projected by APL.  Could the APL projections be materialized?  Sure, anythings possible until the 3rd Friday count.  But over the past 5 years, the K-5 increases have been exactly: 5, 77,72,77, and 40 this year.  It's pretty hard to envision us ballooning to 109.  The economy sputters still. And we haven't resolved the governor fiasco.

Projections call for more growth in the next 10 years than the prior 10.
Hard to believe...right?  From the 2001-2002 school year to the current school year, SPASD saw an increase of 41% at the K-5 level.  904 kids. On average that represents 4.0% per year. That's pretty significant growth.  More significant?  The APL projections (which of course are less accurate the further out they get) suggest 42% growth over the next 10 years.   "So what", you say.  "Big deal".  So growth rises an additional 1%.  What the big hairy dealio?

The big dealio comes in two parts.  First....how realistic to express HIGHER growth than during our boom years over the next 10 years when (A) we've seen stagnant to declining growth and (B) math is funny.  That 42% growth over the next 10 years, translates to an addition 1309 K-5 kids...or 45% MORE kids than we saw come in over the past 10 years.  WTF?  How could essentially the same growth rate translate to 50% more kids?  That's that funny thing about math.  The higher then  starting niumber is, the larger the absolute increase given the same percentage increase.

Or, more simply put, a 50% increase in growth is not a big deal when we're talking about just a few kids kids.  That means just 1-2 kids.  But when the enrollment of K-5 is 3100, then a 50% increase translates to more than 1500 kids.  Is Sun Prairie really that big?

Futurecasting
Really?  Somebody believes that our growth is going to suddenly exceed diminished projections made in 2007-08 and 2008-09?  Really?  Can we maybe think about that?

This past fall the APL updated their projections for us.  As usual, they offer 5 different ways of projection future growth.  Interestingly enough, we pick a different one as our basis each time.  This year the "2-yr trend" was selected based on the scientific WAG* method.  If one superimposes actual enrollments over the past 15 years or so, does the 2'yr trend (which projects the 2nd highest degree of growth) look like the most fitting?

Capacity is a moving target

District administration produces these humongous "monitoring reports" annually.   They are hard to read due to the overwhelming amount of good data mixed in with a bunch of adminospeak.  But...there are some diamonds in that roughage.  We looks at monitoring reports for 2006-07 through 2008-09.  Each presents interesting data on projected growth and timing of need for an 8th elementary school.  For instance, the 2006-07 reported projected that we'd have 320 more K-5 kids than we actually had this school year.  It also projected that an 8th elementary school was needed by this past fall.  Oops.  we missed that memo.  Good thing too....because...newsflash....didn't need it.  The 2008-09 Monitoring report came much closer to projecting enrollment for this past year...the projection was only high by 176 kids.  More to the point, it was this report that first backed up the projected need to the 2013-14 school year.  The biggest thing of note that with the 2008-09 monitoring report, something else changed.  Now the number of kids at which an 8th elementary was needed increased from 3,500 to 3656.  Doing the may, prior to 2008-09, need was based on an average school capacity of 500 kids.  Suddenly, without fanfare, that increased to 516.  Hmmmm.

Projections do not support the need for a new school NOW
The bottom line is that we have to remember our basics from Computer Programming 101: Garbage In=Garbage Out.  It is abundantly clear now that the recession has only thrown a lot of cold water in the face of the hot APL projections.  We're clearly well behind the projected growth curve.  Therefore it's time to turn off the alarms and rescind/revise the timeline for elementary school #8.  We're not opposed to building it.  We simply believe that the urgency of the need for it is less urgent.  Just based on flawed projections, alone it would seem that the earliest an 8th elementary school would be needed would be 2016-17 or 2017-18.

That should shift the need from planning an 8th elementary school to dealing with the 2-3 schools that ARE struggling with capacity now (assuming of course that we know what capacity is).  For longer term, that allows us to give some thought as to what an 8th elementary school would/should look like.  Is it a cookie cutter copy of Horizon/Creekside?  Smaller?  Or is it something entirely different?  Perhaps a charter/magnet school?

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* WAG = Wild Assed Guess