Hello,

As many of you know, I have challenged the district’s financial assumptions for a couple of years now so when I saw that the district continues to use the same ridiculous explanations regarding the implications of cutting the VST program on class sizes, I had to reply.

The district continues to look at class sizes at the individual school level rather than at the district level. They are saying that our choice is to have either 9 kindergarten classes or to have 6. This is where the math generating class sizes of 16 students versus 24 students comes from. The alternative is to think about allocating the 144 resident kindergarten students across classes in the entire district and have either 7 classes (21 student per class) or 8 classes (18 students per class) across the district. This means that 1-2 of the elementary schools would have 3 kindergarten classes while the other 1-2 would have 2 kindergarten classes. As each additional year passes and another grade no longer has VST students, additional classes would be eliminated. It would require slightly modifying the elementary school boundaries and changing the default school assignment for approximately 12 kids per year. This is not a costly change but would enable us to recognize
cost reductions associated with the reduction in enrollments.

Unfortunately, this administration has no desire to cut the VST program and cut the corresponding teaching and support positions. They would rather raise taxes on the residents of Clayton than be forced to make changes that reduce personnel. They have ignored analyzing this suggestion because the financial implications of this plan would remove the primary argument that the district uses to justify the continuation of VST, namely that it makes the district stronger financially. They manipulate the projections by creating rigidities in the budgeting system that do not need to exist and they are aided by a board, particular the president of the board, that does not understand finance. Absent new leadership on the board and in the superintendent’s office, this manipulation will unfortunately continue.

Sincerely,

Michael Faulkender, PhD
Assistant Professor of Finance
Olin Business School
Washington University in St. Louis

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 10:29 am and is filed under CITIZEN CONCERNS, schools/education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.