By BOB GRIFFIN
There will be 3,000 fewer kids in Anchorage School District facilities in 2029 than there were 50 years earlier in 1979. For the sake of our kids and teachers, we need to stop wasting money on unneeded school buildings and focus those resources into classrooms.
According to ASD’s Capital Improvement Plan figures, the district is expecting enrollment to decline to 39,281 students by 2029 (down from a peak of just over 50,000 in 2003/04). Of those students, 3,542 are expected to be in homeschool or other programs — not in ASD facilities.
That brings the total expected to in brick-and-mortar ASD schools to 35,739 students in 2029. That would be the lowest number of kids in ASD facilities as far as records are published by the ASD – back 50 years, to the 1978/79 school year when 38,896 students were in Anchorage school facilities.
Since 1981, ASD has increased the facilities footprint from 5.0 million square feet to over 7.8 million square feet. For context, the floorspace added since 1981 is more than 14 time the size of the 200,000 square foot Dena’ina Convention Center in Anchorage – with a decline in student utilization equivalent to eight elementary school’s fewer students than 1979.
More elbow room for students might seem like a nice luxury – but it comes at a high cost that robs resources from our kid’s classroom operations. For example: Keeping an unneeded elementary school operating takes about 4% per year of the $50 million current replacement value of the typical ASD elementary school in long and short-term maintenance costs, or around $2 million a year.
In addition, each elementary school has a staff of non-teachers who are unique to that facility – costing around $1.5 million year. Utilities cost around $500,000 per year. That means every unneeded elementary school roughly displaces 50 teacher salaries each year.
ASD accounts for the decline in enrollment due to “lower birth rates”. There is some truth to that, but not nearly to the extent that would account for 22% fewer students (11,000 student decline) compared to 2004, when the overall population was 14,000 lower than today. Low birthrates also can’t account for an overall decline in students below the level when the population of Anchorage had just 180,000 residents in 1979.
Over the same period, the MatSu School District has seen increases in student populations and is projecting further increases – roughly in proportion to the population growth. It seems families in south-central Alaska, with school age kids, are likely voting with their feet in large numbers and migrating to school programs that are more aligned with their family values.
Spending money on unneeded schools robs resources from our kids and teachers. We should be holding the Anchorage School District accountable through tough-love measures — like refusing school bond proposals until the district demonstrates they can effectively manage their inventory of unneeded buildings.
Bob Griffin is on the board of Alaska Policy Forum and served on the Alaska Board of Education and Early Development.
Public schools are archaic and detrimental to healthy society. Close the schools. If you need day care I understand.
Time to bite the bullet and size accordingly in the District.
Good luck the voters said no to the inlet view school and the ASD did what they want to protect their empire.
Someone needs to correct the path of the ASD failed policy’s and get the schools back to teaching math English and common sense.
Very informative article. Matsu schools seem to also be doing a good job. We homeschooled but were enrolled in Mat-su central home education program for high school and had a wonderful experience with them. Also, Matsu does a pretty great job keeping roads plowed in winter! With that said though parents that do ‘vote with their feet’ and relocate to the valley, need to please leave any residual politics that helped to get Anchorage in the situation they are in behind.
Operating unnecessary schools is a matter of ASD kowtowing to the teacher’s union(s). It is akin to madating a caboose on a freight train or a navigator in a commercial airplane.
No brainer trade for the teacher’s union.
Assumptions: ASD operates an unnecessary school at a cost of $4 million/yr., which is comparable to the fully loaded cost of 50 teachers. Also assume dues for an ASD teacher are $1,200/yr., or $60k/yr for 50 FTE.
Result: Union gets $60k/yr from 50 dues-paying members and us property owners pay $4 million.
Alternative: Probably the easiest way to rationalize ASD’s cost structure is to make is to ensure that the union gets made whole. Having the union come out ahead might be even better.
Operating unneeded school is not in the best interest of teachers union members. Every public dollar wasted on facilities is a dollar not available for teacher compensation.
The realistic way to look at the teacher’s union is that it is organized crime enterprise. One way or another, they will make a margin. In our case, by ransoming children. Sadly, it would be a lot cheaper – and better for kids – to pay the union some protection money.
Hire the union as consultants with a deliverable that they stay home and watch TV.
Eliminating the Anchorage public school system is essential.
Please, no more Bob Griffin with his fake stats. Let him spout out from the policy forum and let that be his mouthpiece for lies, but keep this place closer to the truth.
No doubt, ASD is evil and corrupt and going a bad direction. No need to fight their lies with lies from Griffin.
Thanks for the feedback. Which specific statistics are you concerned about?
In God We Trust, you must have taken the ASD course on Ad Hominem attacks.
Yes, there are too many classrooms and too few students. 1) Because people become emotionally attached to their schools, it is difficult to close a school.
2) However, no one is emotionally attached to the central office building.
3) When I talk to teachers they do not feel like the bureaucracy supports them, and central office bureaucrats present a very large group including the highest paid staff.
Conclusion: Consider closing the main office and moving the few needed administrators out into empty school classrooms.
Administration staff located in an actual school might rediscover the joy of teaching. Teachers might rib elbows with administrators in a bottom up fashion such that admin staff become part of the solution.
Free admin staff from their cubicles and one might find even more effective ways to improve student outcome.
” It seems families in south-central Alaska, with school age kids, are likely voting with their feet in large numbers and migrating to school programs that are more aligned with their family values. ”
I wonder how much of this has to do with family values and not simple economics. I doubt I would move to the valley just because I don’t like ASD schools.
On the other hand, I agree that ASD has become more and more incompetent over the years at the same rate as the school board and Anchorage assembly. I would blame the dumb Anchorage voters for both.
We have so many excellent charter schools that are limited in size due to space. It is past time to close many elementary schools and transfer the buildings to the charter schools so they can expand. Unfortunately, the marxists on the school board (with one exception) will never agree to this, because of the teachers union. We rank # 1 in the country for our charter schools, where kids actually learn how to read, write and do math. The ASD is a joke, as well as it’s “Superintendent”.
Brett, great idea, except….
1) charter schools are limited in size by ASD. If they don’t like it, ASD will just seize their assets and steal millions of dollars of student funds like they did with Family Partnership. The end.
2) school properties are government properties and cost many times more to operate. For example, want LED lighting to save a little on electricity? In a regular commercial property, often the landlord can be convinced to make the improvement with little extra cost to the tenant, but in a “school” building, it costs more than five times more and takes several years to accomplish because of all the red tape, site studies and evaluations and extra expensive contractor work.
In short, forcing charter schools to use ASD properties would bankrupt nearly all of them. ASD needs to start closing and selling property to match the needs of students and dumb voters need to get educated and stop approving wasteful bonds for corrupt and incompetent school leadership.
There is also a cost to busing kids and not having local schools you can walk to. ASD will be closing schools, but the closures need to be balanced. We are now paying a large cost to the life/cycle costs in the 1990’s prototypical single story schools.
Bussing is minimal cost $26m out of an overall of an operating budget of around $900m.
How can one “right-size” this aggressive, metastatic cancer of a school district?
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Keep cutting big tumors out, little tumors left behind turn into big, inoperable tumors, rinse and repeat until patient and family can’t take it anymore, until someone remembers what hospice does?
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Could the Anchorage School District-School Board body be so riddled with the cancer of corruption, mismanagement, waste, contract fraud, perversion, managerial and teacher incompetence, ideological infestation, child grooming, and academic failure that recovery’s not happening, prognosis is terminal whether we accept it or not?
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Maybe the body is in this dreadful state because its main and only purpose in life has been survival and growth of a profitable, symbiotic bureaucracy immunized from accountability?
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If so, right-sizing seems highly unlikely without a paradigm-shifting miracle, such as Eaglexit, an 80’s style exodus, and/or a RICO investigation.
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What seems more likely is that left-behind residents will be offered the opportunity once again to bail out their education industry by “voting” for a small, fair, sustainable tax, the miracle cure that’ll push ASD’s budget over the magical $1 Billion dollar mark and keep it there come hell or high water.
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Otherwise, Bob’s argument for rightsizing the Anchorage School District is a grand one.
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Could restive residents be forgiven for visualizing it stapled to the shirt of every school district and school-board official together with a one-way airline ticket for somewhere far away?
The only way to solve this ASD problem is the way to solve the Anchorage Assembly problem. And that is through ‘www.eaglexit.com. Now! Break up the monopoly. Break up the Borough. Break up the hegemony. Let’s get back to representative government. Educate. Emancipate. Donate.