quote:
Originally posted by Dinsdale:
I'm just waiting for the announcement - I'm sure it will come any day now.
You know the one I'm talking about. The one where D41 gleefully announces the good news, that all the gloom and doom predictions of increased enrollment have - to date - been proven unfounded. That contrary to predictions dating back to 2002 or so, enrollment numbers have not increased anywhere near where they were predicted to. Instead, over the past couple of years they have actually decreased, which is way below what the most conservative estimates predicted. And that even with the district cramming all special ed and pre-K into the mix, we still have fewer students than the schools were built to serve.
And when they announce the great enrollment news, I'm sure they will add in the greater revenues for the district compared to - say, the late 90s. So we have fewer students to educate than we expected, fewer students than the buildings were intended to handle, yet substantially more money to spend on them just about any way you care to slice and dice the numbers.
This is good news, isn't it?
Like I said, I'm sure the announcement will be forthcoming any day now. Well, either that, or the announcement that they are going to spend more money buying another study from one of their pet consultants...
I've been waiting for that announcement. But don't hold your breath. After all the hype about the expected explosive enrollment growth -- the demographic studies (we've paid for 3 different studies in the past 10 years -- Ehlers, NIU and Kasarda); the facilities brainstorming sessions, committees; facilities usuage study (recently paid consultant BrainSpace); and on and on -- the enrollment topic is a once a month Superintendent report to the board that is usually summarized as "static." Static as in stationary, fixed,
stagnant. Good thing we aren't focusing on enrollment any more.
Instead, when the architects present the timeline for the "Facilities Master Plan Process" the rhetoric by some of our elected officials becomes -- we might be required to have all day Kindergarten, we might be required to have pre-school for all, we have to see what the Hadley consultant recommends, the kids are sitting on the floor in the hall in little groups, etc.
What is enough space and enough money to address all of the unlikely doom and gloom possibilities? Didn't SchoolWeek have an article about the number of portables we have in comparison to other communities? I guess we are so different from so many of the other districts in DuPage County. We're different is right, we are the poster children for what being over-taxed looks like.
