Revisiting closing a school

Remember how Elaine Cappucci said that they will not revisit saving Building C?  Remember how nearly 4,000 residents felt that we should scale back the high school project since projections indicated a drop in student population, rising pension costs, a possible need to close a school or cut programming, and a decrease in state funding? Well, guess what?  WE WERE RIGHT! In today's Almanac (saved in Google Docs), Nick Lewandowski recapped Monday's meeting. The School District has realized they are in a quandary over the 2013-2014 budget.

Elaine Cappucci admitted that, “Closing a school is an option we should at least look at.”  Nuh uh.  Did you just realize that, Elaine?  We have been saying this for more than three years now. We were vilified by the VOICE people. (Gee, where are they now? Oh yeah, they are our elected officials.) We were trashed by local bloggers. (Huh...another elected official.) We hated kids. We were anti education. A school board director was humiliated. We were told to cut back on our lattes. Twenty five percent into the project and Elaine will now revisit closing a school.

Last year at this time, our illustrious school board decided to come up with a list of cost reductions.  We were never permitted to see the entire list.  Students were faced with parking fees, but the administrators all received nice raises. We were also told about a $30 million fundraising campaign to offset the second bond issue. The board has decided to stay with Pursuant Ketchum to raise $6 million.

We have two school board directors who will be running again, Mary Birks and
Dan Remely. Is Mt. Lebanon going to re-elect them just as we re-elected Elaine Cappucci, Ed Kubit, and Larry Lebowitz? Can we come up with some new blood?  Where is the RCML?

Charter a charter

Josephine Posti had a thread on her Center Court blog, Stand Up For Public Education.  She ran article after article about how charter schools are terrible for public education.  Fast forward to Monday's school board meeting.  How do we balance the budget? Number 68 on Dr. Tim's list of suggestions was to close an elementary school. Dan Remely remarked that by renting Mellon to Peters Township, as opposed to selling it, saved us in the end. He wondered if we could turn one into a charter school.  No, we couldn't. Dr. Tim suggested we could charter a charter school. I wish I could have seen Josephine's reaction. That would have been priceless.

More talk about closing schools

I just uploaded the podcast from last night's school board meeting.  I haven't listened to it yet, but I understand there were more discussions about closing schools and Jan Klein's $2.5 million budget hole.  Here is the link to the podcast. 

More School Closings

In today's PG, Oliver and Langley high schools on closing list. Why are we above that?

And in the same paper, Law could restrict school construction projects.

In Mt. Lebanon, the district has been planning to renovate its aging high school and hoped to break ground for the project in April. But the start of the project was delayed due to bids that came in well above the $113.2 million amount projected by the architect and project managers.

Now the district is in the process of finding cost savings so the work is within the budgeted amount. To pay for the project, the district has borrowed $75 million and plans to use money from its capital fund -- as well as institute a second bond issue around 2014 -- to pay for the remainder of the work.

"Our focus in borrowing the second bond issue is to minimize the millage increase, if necessary, to raise those funds," said Janice Klein, finance director. "What the state has done, it has taken away the ability to have an exception to raise millage. We want to keep any millage increase, if necessary, as low as possible."

Once Mt. Lebanon finishes its high school renovation project, it won't need to do any projects for the next several years because other buildings have been renovated in the past 15 years.

How many people disagree with that last statement? Isn't it that mentality that got us into trouble with the high school? Let's not do anything to our buildings for the next 15 years. 

I found this March 23, 2005 PG article today.

Finance Director Jan Klein said she believed there was enough money remaining from the 2003 $50 million bond issue floated by the district to cover the costs of the projects, including the overages.

Mt. Lebanon schools award contracts for Hoover, Washington  We all remember how that turned out. Anyone noticing a common denominator?