Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Capacity management ignores Lowell

For the work session on capacity management with the school board tomorrow, the presentation (PDF) not only does not mention that Lowell will be over 145% of capacity next year, it does not mention Lowell at all.

4 comments:

dj said...

Presumably that is because the presentation is for projected overcrowding 2012-2016, and the Lowell issue will be "fixed".as of next month.

joanna said...

The color coding doesn't match the legend, right?

Anonymous said...

So they will open TT Minor only if all of APP move out of Lowell? Capacity on 329 and they have a question mark for portables. Would love to know what they are thinking. Anybody going to the meeting tomorrow and can report back?

Lowell Parent

Steve said...

Charlie Mas on the Seattle Schools blog pointed out that the District did this in a previous Capacity Management presentation. See this link.

Evidently, the District only includes geographical populations (not program populations) for capacity management. Here's what Charlie had to say in May:

the District does a perfectly terrible job of counting students and counting seats. The numbers shown to the Board are "adjusted" numbers. They are adjusted to discount students in option schools, students in APP, and students in K-8s. So, although the District reduced the student count for these populations, they didn't discount the school capacities for these populations.

Take a look at the numbers for Hamilton. It shows that the school has a functional capacity of 938 and it shows "adjusted" student population in the service area of 661, so they conclude that the school will only be at 70% of capacity. Gee. I guess they forgot about the 220 or so APP students at Hamilton. Put them into the school and the building is at 94% of capacity. Or, viewed another way, reduce the capacity of the school by 220 students and the school's capacity for area students is 92% full.

Is this the way that they calculated the right size for the Garfield attendance area? Did they forget to reduce the capacity available in the school by the number of APP students?

Seriously, this mistake is so basic, so stupid, that is defies credibility.

In all of the capacity management calculations, going all the way back to the beginning of this whole messed up exercise, the District has never thought about non-geographic communities. Given the number of students in option schools and special programs, it astonishes me that the folks planning capacity have forgotten them.


So brain-dead silly to give a presentation to the board without counting all the kids in the schools. I am shocked that the board puts up with it. I suggest we email those board members who attended the Lowell meeting last night and say "remember all those parents you saw in the auditorium? They have kids in these schools."