School Board hears Facilities Study | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

Or, how to waste $24 million

    Jimmy Hite, a Greenville architect, formally presented the School Facilities Study to the Beaufort County Board of Education. We have previously reported what the study shows; and that is that the School Board wasted over $24 million in the most recent bond building program. They overbuilt some schools, but others in the wrong place and failed to build enough in other places. Beyond that, and probably most importantly, they exhausted over five years of annual capital outlay which should have been directed at existing needs.

    So what is their reaction? They quibble over four or five Pre-K classes that were not counted as a result of their own negligence. Watch the video and then we'll explain.





    In the final clip you hear an amazing dissertation by former chairman Robert Belcher, who tries to appear that he is an expert because he was a former principal. What he achieves is showing his ignorance about school planning; revealing that he does not know the difference between "capacity" and "utilization." Watch the video and then we'll explain.



    Before we break it down for you, you will want to review these charts from the study.

    The top chart shows, per school, the square footage size, the capacity (as computed by current state facilities standards), the 2011 first month Average Daily Membership, or ADM, (number of students assigned to that school) and the "Seats available" which is the arithmetic difference between capacity and ADM. As you see in the Totals, at the end of the first month this year Beaufort County Schools had 6736 students. It had capacity for 8953, leaving 2217 seats available under the architect's computation. As we have said before, if you use the state standards that were in existence when the bond projects were planned the capacity in excess of the enrollment would have been closer to 4000 than 2000.

    Another way to look at overbuilding is to compare the number of square feet per student among the schools at each organizational level (elementary-red, middle-light blue, K-8--green and high school -dark blue) in this chart. Obviously Eastern Elementary is the most crowded. Remember, the bond program did not include anything for Eastern Elementary. Snowden is the most overbuilt school and Southside is much more overbuilt than either Northside and nearly three times more overbuilt than Washington High School.

    Yet the board members quibbled over whether the Pre-K students were counted in the ADM, a decision they should have made by policy years ago before they ever assigned those students to a school. Obviously, if you include all 172 you still have three elementary schools and a middle school in excess of capacity. But this was simply ignored by the discussion. It appeared to us that Terry Williams and Robert Belcher were trying to disparage the validity of the study by saying the Pre-K students were not counted. But what they ignore is that the Pre-K number simply raises the issue of whether those classes are assigned to the proper school.

    Mr. Belcher's comments were astounding. He tried to argue that utilization is different from the seats available. Well, duh. Of course it is. "Seats available" is a rough measure of facilities. It looks at the number of students assigned to the school not how they are assigned within the school. It does not take into consideration the teacher allotments. The study does include an inventory of teaching stations that meet the state standards for the grades assigned to that school, but it is just not included in the table.

    Either Mr. Belcher is exceptionally ignorant about school facilities or he is deliberately trying to obfuscate the findings of the study. So let us lay it out for him, and anyone else confused by his remarks.

    The bond projects were very poorly planned. The is grossly overbuilt. The buildings are located in the wrong place. And none of that has anything at all to do with how the space that is currently available is being used (utilization) for the students assigned to that school.

    It is helpful to think about "utilization" from two perspectives. First, is school utilization. That is based on the number of students the school board assigns to a school, compared to its capacity. The other is building utilization. That is how the principal makes use of the school.

    If he wants to talk about "utilization," as Mr. Belcher refers to it, then a different computation must be made. You compute utilization by comparing capacity to the number of students actually assigned to each space by the number of scheduling blocks per day/week. The study does not do that. That is typically the job of the school administration, not the architects. Mr. Belcher, while chairman, did not even ask that a utilization study be included and now he whines about utilization.

    For those who don't know (we assume he knows or was absent from his School Facilities class the day they covered it) let us explain.

    When a certain number of students are assigned to a school you assume they are not all assigned to each classroom on an equal number basis. You also assume that they move from space to space during the day. For example, assume you have 500 students assigned to a school with a rated capacity of 500 and classes change four times a day. You then measure what the utilization is for 2000 events per day (500 seats X 4 periods). You then average those 2000 events to determine utilization. Some rooms are not even used at all in a given scheduling period. Others are used every period. Some rooms are used some periods by more than the computed capacity for that room. Some teachers "travel." Other rooms remain underutilized as students go to art, music, PE, special ed etc. Capacity and utilization are two different animals. Mr. Belcher should know this.

    The "Seats Available" the study shows is school utilization not building or classroom utilization. Mr. Hite tries to explain this to them. He pointed out several times that effective school boards have standards or policies for addressing such computations. That seems to fly over the head of these board members. But we should say that building/classroom utilization is much more important in school system that are growing in population and/or have overcrowding problems. The building utilization becomes very important. That is not Beaufort County's problem right now.

    So the most significant issue raised by this study does not even get one question or one iota of discussions. That is, student assignment.

    Student assignment is a board issue. Building utilization is an administrative issue with effective boards simply adopting a policy about how to compute it and what level of utilization they expect from administrators. School utilization is controlled by student assignment, or actually by drawing attendance area boundaries and establishing the grades assigned to a school and establishing feeder patterns.

    The Pre-K issue raised is an example. Should 88 Pre-K students be assigned to Eastern and 34 to Chocowinity Primary? Should the 5th grade be assigned to Chocowinity Middle? Should some students be transferred from Chocowinity to Snowden? Should Bath remain PK-8? And the biggie: Should Washington remain a unitary feeder system (all students at a given grade going to the same school, thus being bused past closer schools to a more distant school)?

    Not a peep out of a single board member about these questions?

    This School Board has created a monster. The monster's name is "Student Reassignment." The "2217 available seats" are only the tip of the iceberg. What they illustrate is that the capacity is not where the students will be located over the next decade. Thus the question becomes: How are they going to make better use of the facilities that they have?

    Dr. Phipps does mention that he is working on getting a demographic study done that will project trends and future enrollments. Hopefully that will be done soon. It is already too late to get anything done (correctly) for next year. Maybe 2014.

    This School Board has wasted over $24 million since 2004. At least now they know what their current inventory of facilities is. Now if they can get a handle on how many students they will have over the next ten years and where those students will be located maybe they can make better use of the existing facilities the tax payers have already given them.

    What the numbers show is that they were not making very good use of the space they had before they built more space in the wrong place. How to count Pre-K and building utilization on each campus is the least of their problems.