News-Record.com

Doug, you've hit the nail on the head by comparing per-pupil costs. GCS staff prefers to limit the discussion to per-square-foot costs, given their preference for larger schools. It's like a family of four rationalizing the purchase of a Chevy Suburban over a Chevy TrailBlazer because they cost the same per pound.

Thanks, Jeff. Where should GCS look for savings?

The short answer: look at what other districts are doing. The Wake County report you reference touches on some ideas, but I've found Charlotte-Mecklenburg's efforts to be more impressive. Morgan Glover touched on some of their activities in a recent article; they also convened a "Superintendant's Standards Review Committee" whose final report lists numerous specific cost containment ideas. Compare the quantity and size of the projects contained in their recently approved bond to gauge their success for yourself.

Doug and Jeff, don't overlook that the N&R privileges the cost per square foot number as well. Morgan Glover's piece justifying the price of GC schools a while back made this explicit. It was an abominable piece of propaganda. Of course cost-per-pupil costs make more sense (because we're educating children, not space).

Where should GCS look to cut costs? I don't know--through cutting the size of schools per pupil like everywhere else?

Doug, one question you guys never ask is why tax revenues can't (except indirectly--since taxes will pay for the bonds eventually) pay for schools. If we have so many students needing them, don't we have so many more parents paying for them?

Or is, as I suspect, the population growth coming from mostly poorer demographic groups? My rather uncharitable guess is that Greensboro has an increasingly bad mouth-to-wallet ratio: too many people needing services, too few able to pay for them. Is this correct?

That's a good research question. My sense is that school enrollment is rising much faster than tax-base growth.

Another potential fallout of the dip in the real-estate market: falling tax values of many homes, exacerbating problem stated above?

I'm not sure actual real estate values are keyed very closely to assessed tax value, although there's surely a connection in the long run.

I do wish, however, the paper would occasionally look into such things. If, as some numbers I've seen suggest (are these correct?), more than half of GCS students get reduced or free lunches--an astonishing number, if true--then that offers support for my hypothesis. (And, I suggest, an obvious reason why your reporters won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.)

The harsh truth is that any community (or nation, for that matter) can only afford so many dependents, and public schools, I suspect, are at the lead edge of the tipping point (to mix metaphors badly). That is, we see there first the deterioration of public institutions when a critical threshold of payers-to-consumers is reached.

The majority of the impact of the downturn in home prices wouldn't be realized until the next real estate tax valuation scheduled for 2012; current values are supposed to be based on market value as of the 2004 valuation.