News-Record.com

For those of you who would like a historical perspective on Superintendent Terry Grier's raises (courtesy of Sharon Ozment, chief finance officer):

Guilford County Schools Payroll Information: Terry Grier

1999-00: $164,000.04
2000-01: $164,000.04
2001-02: $179,000.04
2002-03: $179,000.04
2003-04: $182,329.44
2004-05: $182,329.44
2005-06: $182,329.44
2006-07: $187,873.20
2007-08: $202,903.08

The school board voted 10-0 10-1 (Darlene Garrett voted no) last week to give Grier an 8 percent raise, a reward for meeting goals set during the previous school year. So, what were those goals?

You can find the data behind Sunday's construction costs story with the N.C. Department of Public Instruction (click on "construction costs" to the left). Note: I had to revise the 2005 averages in the spreadsheet because the Northern numbers listed are inaccurate.

When I started working on the series about school construction in Guilford County, one of the questions I had was "why did Northern High cost so much more than Reagan?" The reason? From board meetings, to blogs, to phone calls, I have heard people compare the two. I found in my research that there really is no "apples to apples" comparison, but you can come close by looking at inflation-adjusted cost per square foot and cost per student (a bit more difficult to come by).

When you look at the state comparison data, you can find reasons to criticize many school districts, not just Guilford. It just depends on the angle you take. When you take out projects in Wake, Mecklenburg and Guilford -- the state's largest school systems, cost averages come down. (but then you have to wonder, how valuable is data that omit school systems with the largest student populations and the most schools built?)

At any rate, advantages and disadvantages exist to comparing total building costs, per square foot costs and costs per student:

Total building costs: Tells you up front how much it cost to build a school, but doesn't include pieces that are harder to compare, such as furniture, equipment and soft costs. Some reasons to not compare total costs: One school system may benefit from buying all its furniture in bulk through one contractor as opposed to buying it per project. Another district may decrease its soft costs by working with one architect on several different schools or using a prototype design. The downside to total building costs is you can't really compare a 200,000 square foot school to a 80,000 square foot school.

Building cost per square foot: Allows comparisons in that you can better control for disparate building sizes and student populations (for example, a school may be built to house a disproportionate number of students with disabilities, which requires smaller class sizes). The downside to cost per square foot is that you can have schools with the same cost average, giving the appearance of equity, but one building can be more wasteful in space than the other.

Cost per student: Helps make up for the weakness in cost per square foot by taking into account wasteful space (i.e. two schools may have the same cost per square foot, but one devotes more square footage to students than needed). The downside to cost per student is that school districts use different formulas to allocate space and this may give a false representation (i.e. 30 students per classroom versus 25). Another issue is some students by law require more space than others (i.e. classroom wing for students with autism or the state's move to lower class sizes in K-3). The other downside is that student enrollments fluctuate, so a school may have been built to originally house 1,000 students but because of enrollment or programmatic changes, the population could shift to say, 900 students, or 1,100 students. That would change the cost per student, while the cost per square foot would stay the same.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I would elaborate on Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' proposal to build two high schools for $50.6 million each (as listed on a 2007 bond to be held in November). The context: Guilford County Schools is looking at building an airport-area high school costing in the mid-$70 million to $88 million range. The latest school built -- Northern High -- will cost about $54 million.

OK, here's the rundown, according to Mike Raible, executive director for facilities planning and real estate: The schools would actually cost $53.6 million each, not including the price of land (the $3 million in design fees comes from certificates of participation). The schools would accommodate about 2,000 students, have 100 classrooms and be about 260,000 square feet. The building and site costs alone for the schools would total about $36.9 million.

What is interesting about these schools is that they will accommodate roughly the same number of students that two recently-opened Mecklenburg high schools could at 307,000 square feet. Building and site costs alone for Mallard Creek High School and Ardrey Kell High School were $46 million and $36.6 million, respectively.

So how did CMS get the square footage and costs down? It held a public competition last fall between three architectural firms. The firms (selected from an original list of 19) spontaneously designed the high schools over the course of a week, Raible said.

"They walked in with nothing," Raible said.

In the end, the district was able to cut space out of its previous prototypes by about 15 percent. Raible says space was saved in areas like the corridors. More than 100 people, including school administrators and educators, participated in the process. On the last day, firms attached cost estimates to their designs.

Raible indicated that although people appreciate the district's effort to economize, there is a fine line between efficient and cheap.

"The problem is really not to do a cheap building," he said. "I think there's a point at which you can economize. But you can't go from the sublime to the ridiculous."

The Center on Education Policy in Washington, D.C., released today the report of a 12-year study tracking a cohort of students through urban public and private schools. It found that:

"...once family background characteristics are taken into account, low-income students attending public urban high schools generally performed as well academically as students attending private high schools. The study also found that students attending traditional public high schools were as likely to attend college as those attending private high schools. In addition, the report also finds that young adults who had attended any type of private high school were no more likely to enjoy job satisfaction or to be engaged in civic activities at age 26 than those who had attended traditional public high schools."

Check out the press release and full report here.

It didn't occur to me until after the fact that the story I wrote about Guilford County Schools' preliminary crime and violence report would run the same day as news of the high school shooting in Cleveland, Ohio. And it hit me that all it takes is one shooting to bury in the public's mind any attempts or achievements a district has made to reduce crime and violence in its schools.

If Guilford's numbers pan out with the official state report, the school system's rate of incidents will have dropped for the first time since 2003-04. While assaults tend to get the most attention in the media (i.e. the students at Grimsley who were attacked recently), by far the most incidents reported are possessions of a weapon (at 243 incidents) and possessions of a controlled substance (at 116 incidents last year).

The district reported 7 instances of possession of a firearm, up from 4 the previous year. Of course, these numbers represent people who were caught and reported, so the figures could indeed be higher.

The district's facilities department plans to hire a consulting firm to help develop a set of educational specifications for new construction, in anticipation of a proposed bond referendum. GCS consultant Joe Hill told members of a construction advisory commitee on Tuesday that he hopes to start the process in November and seek approval of the guidelines from the Board of Education in April. (A story about this ran today on B3, but was not posted online).

The specifications would define standards for class sizes, athletic facilities, technology and other areas. The district also intends to update its 7-year-old design guidelines, which focus on the infrastructure of a school, including heating and cooling systems, plumbing and roofs. The overall goal of these guidelines is to cut construction costs, officials said.

This is a big deal as most projects, even though they may employ a prototype design, are planned individually and are vulnerable to lobbying by those building the schools and those moving in. The ed specs would standardize how most schools are built and the design guidelines would cut out on some of the "frills."

Educators and members of the community would participate in this process, attending workshops to give input from January through March. Hill said he expects the firm's services (one of which is to lead the process without bias) to cost less than $150,000 (an amount more than that requires school board approval).

Residents interested in improving the learning environment and student behavior in Guilford County Schools are invited to attend a series of meetings organized by the Board of Education’s School Climate Task Force. (Previous story here.)

The task force plans to report to the school board in January ways for the district to improve how it handles student misbehavior. The group includes teachers, school administrators, community representatives, students, parents and law enforcement officers.

Meetings will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the following locations:
l Thursday, Williams Memorial CME Church, 3400 Triangle Lake Road, High Point;
l Oct. 30, Eastern Middle School, 435 Peeden Drive, Gibsonville;
l Nov. 13, Grimsley High School, 801 Westover Terrace, Greensboro;
l Nov. 29, Southern Middle School, 5747 Drake Rd., Greensboro;
l Dec. 6, Roy B. Culler Senior Center, 600 N. Hamilton St., High Point.

Chairman Alan Duncan really wanted the school board to finalize the bond project list Thursday night, but that didn't happen. Instead, members decided to take one last fine-toothed comb through the proposals. Jeff Belton's second thought: shrinking the planned classroom capacity at the new Jamestown Middle School.

Since Jamestown's design is nearly complete, Guilford County Schools may have to pay a bit more to change the blueprint, while only realizing about $2 million to $3 million in savings from the shrinkage. If the district relocates a planned $8.5 million autism wing at Ragsdale High to Jamestown, that could save some duckets. If the board does decide to modify the Jamestown design, it would move Allen Jay middle renovations higher up on the list to make sure it can accommodate reassigned students.

What do you think of Jamestown Middle having 900 students instead of 1,200? Belton believes 900 students (close to what other local middle schools were built for) would be more manageable. Is the change worth it?

Check out this story by CNN about a Kentucky school district that plans to shut down its 23 schools Monday to disinfect against MRSA (antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria). Should GCS have done something similar when two cases were recently confirmed at Northeast and Smith high schools?

Twenty-four percent of eligible faculty at 20 Mission Possible schools will receive performance bonuses of $2,500 to $5,000 for improving test scores this year. School board members were notified about the bonuses (to go out with Wednesday checks) on Friday. I am still waiting on a breakdown by school and will post it when I get it. Be sure to read the full story on Tuesday.

Update: Check out the last page of this attachment for details by school. I requested a breakdown with eligible faculty and bonuses per school, but the district gave me this instead.

Check out Thursday's story on where North Carolina and Guilford County Schools stands in meeting the No Child Left Behind requirement that 100% of core teachers be highly qualified. You can find a spreadsheet of the district's performance here. I did not have time or space to squeeze this into the print version, but here is how GCS stacks up against comparable/bordering districts:

Guilford: 99.15 percent
Wake: 98.63 percent
Charlotte-Mecklenburg: 94.81 percent
Winston-Salem/Forsyth: 96.26 percent
Rockingham: 96.21 percent
Alamance: 98.53 percent

Source: DPI

I'm also running tomorrow a story on Grier's suggestion that some elementary schools extend their instructional day by one hour and school year by two weeks. I didn't have space in the story for this report that was released in January about the push in several states across the country to go this route.