Phil on the CG & TP capacity

Phil McDade weighed in on the comments section, and I though his response is worth reposting here.

Since the question was asked...(and apologies in advance for the length of this response):

In my view, it's important to distinguish between the two elementary schools in Cottage Grove -- Taylor Prairie (TP) and Cottage Grove School (CG).

Start with TP. It currently enrolls 401 students. The school houses K and 1st grades, plus some sections of the district's new 4-year-old kindergarten program. Although its capacity is listed by the district as 364, I think it's important to look at actual classroom usage, to my mind a more insightful way of assessing usage. We have 8 sections of K at TP, 7 of 1st grade. We have 4 sections of 4K, but since they only attend half-days, we use only two classrooms for those 4K students. We also have dedicated classrooms for art, music, and a computer lab, in addition to dedicated rooms for children with special needs, such as our occupational therapy/physical therapy (OT/PT)classroom. In addition, the "step-room" at TP -- used in previous years for music -- is now open and available for use (teacher training, art shows, the like). The library, gym and cafeteria are used for their original purposes, i.e., we don't have any "spillover" usage of those spaces for anything other than regular instructional/other use. In short, we're using all of the available classrooms at TP, but -- in my view -- we're not overcrowded in that school.

CG School: There is a legitimate argument, in my view, that CG is beyond capacity, but not terribly overcrowded. It currently enrolls 477 students; its listed capacity is 440. We currently have 7 sections each of 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades in CG. We have two dedicated computer labs there, plus a number of spaces for instruction of children with special needs. Are they smaller than regular classrooms? Yes, some are. Are they closets? Not by any stretch. As for crowding at CG, it's mainly confined to related-arts classes like music and art. Music is currently being taught in the step room -- a much larger space than a regular classroom, but it makes that space unavailable for other school uses. Art (and 4th graders who take strings) is currently held in a portion of the cafeteria walled off with a temporary, movable wall. So, in the end, "crowding" at CG comes down to music and art being taught in something other than classroom space, and a smaller cafeteria. Is that less than ideal? Without question. But it is less-than-ideal for only a (relatively) small portion of any student's given day. Most instruction at the elementary levels takes place in regular education classrooms. In my view, CG is "overcrowded," but it's on the order of a few small degrees -- essentially two or three classrooms.

But didn't the school district/board at one time talk about a building addition for CG School? Good question; indeed it did. Some background that may be helpful. The school board put together the referendum package in February '06. The previous referendum, at a cost of $39.9 million, included a four-classroom addition to CG School. A friend of mine dubbed that referendum the "everything AND the kitchen sink" referendum. It failed badly, garnering only 37 percent support. When the board came back to put together the second referendum, it was concerned (quite appropriately, I would argue) with holding down its cost, and by a significant amount. Part of what was pared from the second referendum was the CG classroom addition, at a cost of at least $1 million and perhaps as much as $2 million. As one of two current board members who helped put together that referendum package, holding off on the CG classroom addition was one of the tougher decisions we made. But we also knew the second referendum had to be less expensive, viewed as more affordable by the citizenry, and demonstrate that the board was serious about paring back costs. In the end, the second referendum cost $28.7 million (still a substantial amount for a district our size), and passed with 59 percent of the vote.

The broad point is this: the school board made a very explicit (and unanimous) decision to approve a referendum package that included a new middle school, and significant improvements to Winnequah, in return for not expanding CG School. The board tried, in the old political parlance, to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Was there a solid rationale at the time for adding on to CG School. Yes? But the larger rationale was passage of the referendum.

Now, I fully recognize and accept that there are those in our school district community who continue to believe that referendum did not meet the needs of the district, and that it should have focused instead on renovating/expanding Winnequah and providing, in some form, additional elementary classroom space in the Cottage Grove attendance area. But the referendum put out by the board, the one that focused instead on building a new middle school (along with improvements to Winnequah), was endorsed by 59 percent of the voters. I don't know of any similar-sized districts that have seen anything as expensive passed by such a margin; maybe there is one, but I haven't found it. In short, I believe the board's decision on the referendum was soundly endorsed by a significant share of the district's voters.

What about future enrollments? They are tough to predict, for anything more than two years out (for a variety of factors, i.e., housing markets, open enrollment trends, gas prices...).

Things we know:

-- TP enrolled eight sections of K this fall, and will likely enroll 8 sections next fall. TP has never enrolled more than 8 sections (classrooms) of K in any one year since it opened in the mid-1990s. That's not to say it won't happen in the future, but it hasn't in the decade-plus that the school has been open.

-- CG School will likely have the same number of regular-education sections next fall (21) that it currently has (7 sections each of the three grades). Seven sections of 4th grade grade will move out, and seven sections of the 1st graders that are now at TP will move in. To my mind, the bigger crunch at CG School comes in the fall of 2010, when the school has to absorb the 8 sections of K now at TP, or one more than CG school currently has now (we have fairly sophisticated models of enrollment retention done by the UW population lab; essentially they tell us that once students enroll in our schools, they tend to stay with us until they graduate. Modest growth in grade enrollment occurs primarily in the middle and high school years, largely through private school/open enrollment into those grades. We tend not to "grow" that much in the elementary years).

-- We enroll 703 student at Glacial Drumlin; its official capacity is 750. There is some room for enrollment growth there, but not a ton (middle school classroom space tends to be a bit more flexible than elementary space, as well). Again, getting back to the referendum, the board tried very hard to "right-size" that school -- not too big (as one of my board colleagues said at the time, "You don't build a church for Easter Sunday"), but large enough to handle some level of enrollment growth. I remain convinced GDS is large enough to handle future enrollment growth in the district.

To answer the question directly of the previous poster, my view (perhaps shared by others on the school board, but perhaps not) is that we don't have a serious overcrowding issue at our CG schools. We have overcrowding at one elementary school there, but it is relatively modest, in my view (on the order, roughly, of 10 percent of the building capacity, or enrollment projections from two years ago, however you want to look at it). Others may view it as alarming, but I don't share that view. Is it manageable in the near-term? I think so, although my guess is that how it can be managed will provoke some interesting debate in our school community. I will say flatly that the crowding at CG School, in my view, doesn't necessitate the drastic step of a referendum for a third elementary school in the CG attendance area; that, to me, would be an overreaction to what I view as a relatively modest problem. (Besides, I don't think this district should seek approval of another school building referendum until the high school referendum is paid off, which I think is about 10 years from now.)

I hope some or all of this provides some additional context for this debate, and perhaps even proves helpful.