Awhile back (April), I had asked for a presentation to the Finance committee on the particulars of the School Budget and the revenue sharing agreement.  That presentation was made last Wednesday night (agenda is here).  There were also several School Board members present.  Here are the facts, short and sweet:

If we had no revenue sharing agreement, the Council could allocate whatever revenue they allocated to the schools by broad category.  There are 8 categories (instruction, transporation, etc).  The law doesn’t give the Council the authority to allocate on any sort of line-item basis.  That’s in the state law, not city code.  You can find the details in the Agenda.

Under the revenue sharing agreement, it doesn’t appear that the Council has the authority to allocate on any basis except a lump-sum payment.

The opinions of the longest serving members on both bodies are very interesting.  Mr. Bushnell (former chair of the school board) observed that “when the agreement was struck, it was his opinion that the Council wanted to divorce itself from the details of the schools”.  I think that’s about right but now that we’re having mixed rsults that’s changed.  Mr. Randolph well remembers the food-fights before the agreement was struck.

I believe that the performance of the schools are the City’s biggest challenge.  To that end, I, and the rest of the Council have asked the City Manager to schedule a meeting with the School Board to cover the performance of the system and some recent studies that have been printed – the ROI study and the Challenge index in particular but the State report card is also of interest.  This meeting will be important and people should attend.  I’ll post back when the meeting is scheduled.

Another moving piece here is the Education Forward committee (a piece of the original Manassas Next).  The committee is scheduled to meet August 11th at 7:00, second floor conference room.  The schools proposal, as I understand it, is to add 4 reading specialists to the schools.  I’ll wait until I see all of it but it sounds a little less ambitious than I had hoped for…..

The Washington Post comes out with the “Challenge Index” every year.  It’s based on a simple formula that education columnist Jay Mathews developed.   From the WaPo: “The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave in 2010 by the number of graduating seniors.”  If you want some more nitty-gritty there is a discussion here.

The Challenge Index (CI) is not without its problems.  For instance, every kid in Osbourn could be enrolled in AP classes and it wouldn’t alter our CI score.  It’s the test part that matters.  If the kids don’t take the AP test associated with the class (there is no requirement that you take it) it doesn’t count for the purposes of the CI.  The second shortcoming that others have noted is that the test costs money.  Now, if you’re going to college you want to pay for that test as a passing score gives you college credit – at a lower price.  However, there are a bunch of kids that don’t take it – maybe they don’t have the money?  I don’t know.  Some of our surrounding jurisdictions pay for those tests – as we have in the past but do not now.

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