You will never read about the most important thing going on in Manassas in any newspaper.  Which is another way of saying that the Education Forward committee met on Saturday morning.  Dr. Pope presented a list of changes for our consideration.  Here’s that list in its entireity:

1.  Touch Time
a.  Decrease class size to 18:1.  Currently somewhere around 25:1
b.  Mandate a 200 day school year which would be longest in state

2.  Best Facilities
a.  Replace old buildings/infrastructure
b.  Upgrade to state of the art sciene labs, libraries, etc.

3.  Dramatically alter programmatic structure
a.  City wide k-8 school of choice (kind of like pennington)
b.  City wide k-4 school of choice
c.  K-12 International Baccalaureate Program
d.  Day long pre-K for all 4 year olds
e.  Every graduate earns an associate’s degree from NOVA
f.  STEM Academy as a school within a school

4.  Education technology leader in the state
a.  Electronic textbooks
b.  Notebooks/tablets for every student
c.  Partner with NVTC

5.  Increased Expectations
a.  A city that expects success: Council, School Boards, Superintendent
b.  Mandatory Uniforms
c.  Parental involvement

Here are my thoughts on this list: First and foremost, it is precisely what we’ve been looking for: a list of options, some of which are a reach and some more modest.  It is important to note that some of the items on the list, if selected, necessarily exlude other choices.  You wouldn’t do 3(a) and 3(b) for instance.  Many if not all of these options will require money.  Some will require quite a lot of it.

Just as a for-example: Reducing the student-teacher ratio (which seems to be a fairly direct and well-understood route to increasing performance) would be very expensive.  A quick back of the envelope calculation would seem to require we hire 40 teachers (I could be wildly wrong!).  Assuming they make an average of $50k (which is likely low) that would be $2 million a year in salary.  I don’t know what the schools overhead rate is but say it’s 30% and your loaded labor cost is $2.6 million.  They’ll also need some place to teach.  Say you can build the necessary facilities for $20 million.  That’s $2 million a year in debt service.  That’s $4.6 million a year but that number is a wild guess and could be off by 50%!.  Assuming it’s $4.6, that’s 12.5 cents on the property tax rate if we find no other way to pay for it (renting space, etc).  This is serious business.

The committee has asked Dr. Pope to do some rough order of magnitude costing and an idea of impact for each item.  We also asked her to work with the City Manager in order to come up with a proposal for a unified communications strategy.  We’ll meet in early December to review the new information and make some selections.

Had an Education Forward meeting tonight.  The meeting started with a charge from the Mayor and Chair to the committee to move this along quickly and be audacious.  I’ll upload the letter tomorrow and link it.

The committee discussed things for about an hour and then we agreed that we would need several meetings to develop and evaluate the various policy options available to us.  Essentially, the committee would evaluate our options and make recommendations to our staff.  The staff will utilize their expertise and experience to flesh out those recommendations and help the committee see what those selections mean.  I kinda sketched this up on the fly so I had to give it to the clerk but I’ll upload a copy so everyone has an idea of what’s going on.  For anyone who thought we would solve all of this tonight, that ain’t the way it works.  Public policy is often 4 yards and a cloud of dust.  If it isn’t, many times people feel left out.  Time is limited so we need to jam many meetings into a short time period but we will get there.

This meeting was necessary to get it all going and the meetings will only become more difficult as we go along.  Thanks to the citizens who made the time to turn out.  It’s always good seeing you folks.  (If anyone wants to talk about it, you’ve got my email address.  Buy me a beer and I’ll talk your ear off…:) )  I promise to get the documents uploaded as soon as I can.  Overall a productive first step.

UPDATE:  Challenge Letter is here.