School board already planning to ignore its own capacity numbers

When our school district embarked on creating a long-term facilities plan, it hired consultants to tell it how many kids each building could hold.  The consultants determined that our existing buildings could hold far fewer kids than the district had previously believed.  Those capacity numbers then became the foundation of the entire long-term planning process, including the decision to close Hoover Elementary and build three large new elementary schools elsewhere.

Several people (including me) repeatedly pointed out that the capacity numbers were unrealistically low, because they would require class sizes that the district can’t afford no matter how many schools are built.

Now the school board has essentially admitted as much, by proposing a class size policy that would put significantly more kids in each classroom than the consultants say the rooms can hold.  The classrooms will necessarily be used to hold more kids than the consultants say they can hold, which means the long-term plan was based on a fiction.

Is that what “data-driven” education policy looks like?

For my full post on this topic, click here.

Chris Liebig blogs about local and national education issues at A Blog About School.  You can also follow him on Twitter.