Schools

Iowa City School Board Wooed by Potential Consultants

Three different consultants spoke to board members during Tuesday night's facilities meeting. They may or may not be hired to help the district with its coming big decisions about building new facilities in the district.


It had the feel of an education software tradeshow at the Iowa City School District administration building Tuesday night.

A trio of different consulting groups were represented at the Iowa City School Board's Facilities Meeting, summoned by Superintendent Steve Murley to give the board members an idea of where his priorities lie with gathering data that will help the district make decisions .

His stated goals: to reassure the public of the accuracy of the district's enrollment numbers, to determine an actual concrete student capacity for each building, and to deal with attendance zones (redistricting) in a quicker and more transparent manner.

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Murley said these consultants were intended to give an idea of what is out there in terms of regional consultants that the district can hire. At the board's discretion, all of these consultants could be hired, or none of them, or a different consultant could be hired altogether.

The board will provide Murley feedback on the consultants at its Aug. 21 meeting. 

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These presentations included:

1. Applied Population Laboratory, from the University of Wisconsin. Sarah Kemp, the first presenter, told the board that APL would look at 10 years of Iowa City School District's historical enrollment data, and attempt to project 10 years into the future using the cohort survival method and factoring in mitigating factors such as housing development and kindergarten size.

Board member Tuyet Dorau pointed out that this method was similar to the one currently used by Geoffrey Smith of the University of Iowa Geography department, whose enrollment projections the district currently uses. Murley conceded that this was correct, but said since the numbers the district uses have been called into question several times, it would be helpful to have an alternative expert perform projections to check the validity of Smith's numbers. 

Kemp said districtwide accuracy for IPL would be one to three percent for the first five years, and three to five percent for the subsequent five years.

Estimated Time of Project: Four to Eight Months. Estimated Cost: $8,000 - $24,300 based on complexity.
 
2. BLDD Architects (Illinois) presented next. Sam Johnson, director of the PK-12 Design Group, told the school board BLDD's product would be a database that ranks the upkeep cost and educational environment of each building in the district in quantitative terms, also determining the true capacity of each building based on each room's educational use. Johnson said this would then allow the school district to run different scenarios determining the cost to benefit ratio of each of its potential building decisions. He said the ratings for the buildings would be based on standards developed by the Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI).

"It's a good tool, it's an objective evaluation," Johnson said. 

Determining all of these ratings would require a complete walkthrough of each building, he said. The database would then belong to the district. 

Estimated Time of the Project: Could be done by late fall of this year. 
Estimated Cost: $120,000. 

3. GuideK12 - Geovisual Analytics For Education. (Eagan, Minnesota) The final presentation of the evening was from Carey Charboneau with GuideK12. Charboneau said GuideK12 is a software program that could synch on a repeating basis with the enrollment data entered into the district's PowerSchool software.
Charboneau said this would not only allow live updates on what students are throughout the district, when combined with capacity numbers it could also be used to provide real-time editing for new school and redistricting scenarios, allowing administrators to make hypothetical changes and quickly see the results on the effects to demographics and building capacity.

David Dude, the district's director of operations, said GuideK12 would be useful for the district not only to allow for multiple redistricting scenarios to be drawn up quickly, efficiently and transparently, it would also help the district keep a record of just what changes had been made in enrollment during the course of the year.

"That's huge from our perspective, since PowerSchool does not keep history,"

Cost of Software: $2.25 per student/renewable each year.
Time to Implement: Roughly four weeks. 


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