Warrant Article 1 - Four Room Addition to Jacques

There are three warrant articles that deal with the subject of public kindergarten. This post concerns article 1.

This article authorizes the razing of the Bales annex, and the construction of a four-room addition to the Jacques school to allow for the integration of a half-day kindergarten program into the building. The addition will be on the east end of the building.

The kindergarten program will actually be located in the west end of the building, since each of the rooms in that end of the building have in-room toilets as specified in kindergarten facility requirements. The newly constructed rooms will be used for alternate requirements such as first grade classrooms. The actual configuration of the building and allocation of rooms to specific functions will be done at a later date when there is a better understanding of the specific enrollments.

This proposal for providing space for a half-day kindergarten program has several distinct advantages that (in my opinion) make it the best option for the Milford school district.

Unified Programming

Having kindergarten and first grade in the same building will help the staff to collaborate and coordinate their efforts. They will be able to easily discuss issues to insure that the programs are aligned and that they are working towards a common curriculum. There are a lot of benefits from the informal discussions that will happen every day in the staff lunchroom.

Fewer Transitions

Starting school for the first time can be a very scary time for students. Going to a new school, meeting new teachers, meeting new support staff, learning the physical layout, and learning all the new rules can all be difficult. It will be much easier on the students for them to start kindergarten in one building, and then to transition to first grade in the same place. They will have a new teacher, but most of all the other elements will be familiar. They will be able to more quickly adjust from the half-day kindergarten program to the full-day first grade program.

This is especially helpful for those students with the greatest needs. If a student is receiving additional help for some issue in kindergarten, then it is likely that they will be receiving the same help from the same person in the same room or facility in the first grade. It is hard to put a specific value on this, but in some cases, this can be huge.

Lower Overhead

Building a four-room addition to Jacques will help to minimize the overhead associated with the new program. Most of the overhead functions should be able to handle the increased student load with a minimal impact. There are a few areas that will need additional help, but these are relatively few. There will be a need for an extra half-time custodian, and the office will need some more secretarial support.

This is not the case with a stand-alone building as outlined in warrant article 2. If kindergarten is in a stand-alone building, then there are many duplicate support functions that need to be provided. It needs to be scoped out to see if it can be pared back, but an initial estimate by the district administration showed extra overhead costs that are above the baseline costs for the Jacques addition proposal of about $200,000 per year. This includes costs for things like extra custodial services, a nurse, extra office personnel, lead teacher stipend. Perhaps this could be parred down some, but it is unlikely to go below an extra $150,000 per year to support a stand-alone building. This is roughly $0.10 to $0.14 per year on the tax rate, or $30 to $40 per year for a $300,000 house.

The school board and the school administration work closely together to try to provide a quality learning environment for our students while minimizing the tax impacts of the choices that we make. I hate to see us waste money on needless overhead functions since it means that we are not being effective stewards of the taxpayers money.

Money is tight, and we need to focus our spending on areas that make a difference to students. If we were to choose to spend an extra $150,000 to $200,000, then I would much rather spend it where it can do some good. I'd much prefer to spend it on curriculum or teachers or some other area with a direct influence on students. I hate to see it spent on extra custodians, or for an extra nurse when the need for these positions can be easily avoided.

Having good custodians and nurses and other similar positions is very important to a quality experience for students, but if we can structure our organization to keep these positions to a minimum, then we need to do that.

Low Cost

Article 1 authorizes local tax spending of no more than $462,054 for the addition. The balance of the construction spending will come from the state kindergarten construction program. This will be bonded over 10 years, and equals about $0.04 on the tax rate, or about $12 a year for a $300,000 house. This is a modest amount for the benefit of having a nice permanent facility.

This is based on the assumption that the state will fund 75% of the construction as recommended by the state adequate education costing committee. Normal building aid is only 30% of the cost of construction, so we will be getting much more bang for our buck than is normally expected. If we don't take advantage of the kindergarten construction aid soon, then it will run out and we will be back to the 30% match level.

There is a slight chance that the state will increase their funding to 100% of the kindergarten construction cost. If that happens, then the state would fund the entire project, and there would be no construction cost for this option. In any event, there is not a huge difference between $0 per year and $12 per year per property.

Medium Term Solution

Over the past few years, I have tried to find methods to better predict where our school enrollments are heading. This is important since the school board adopts enrollment projections each fall that form the basis of the budget for the next year.

We normally predict enrollments for grades two through twelve by comparing the average cohort survival rate for the past few years, and use that to predict the next year. An example would be if there were on average 200 students in grade three each year and an average of 202 students in grade four the following year, then there is an average pick up of 1% when going from grade three to grade four. If we have 190 in grade three this year, then we would expect to have about 192 in grade four next year.

This approach seems to work well, and is simple to implement.

The problem comes when we need to predict the enrollments for the initial grades where there are no cohorts to compare to. We have been using the birth rates from five or six years earlier, and factoring them up by an average amount to get this years number. A typical calculation would be that 150 births 6 years ago correlates to 200 first grade students this year. This seems to work to some degree, but there are wider variations on the correlation than the cohort survival method since the data is more suspect, and there is a longer period of time between events.

This method does not allow us to go beyond a five or six year forecast, so some other method is needed to forecast for longer periods. Peter Bragdon brought the following report to my attention. The Housing and School Enrollment in New Hampshire: An Expanded View report is a study that was published in 2005 that helps to understand the basic demographics that are driving school enrollments in New Hampshire. The study does not discuss Milford in particular, but it looks at overall demographic trends in the state, especially as they relate to numbers of students per dwelling unit.

One key forecast of the study is found on page nine of the report. There is a chart that shows that the total school age population in New Hampshire grew by 39,700 from 1990 to 2000, it is expected to grow 5,500 from 2000 to 2010, and it is expected to decline 13,600 from 2010 to 2020. The theme of the report is that this overall demographic forecast is the main driver in school enrollments, not the number of new dwelling units as is commonly believed.

This makes sense to me. You can compare this to tides raising and lowering the overall level of boats, while waves, wind, and other local conditions have a supplementary effect. The tides are the key factor and the waves are a secondary factor.

We have seen an easing of enrollments in Milford, and we should see declines in the future as some of our larger class sizes age out of the system. It is my belief that the overall demographic trends of lowered enrollments in New Hampshire for the next decade or so will also apply to Milford. Based on this, I expect that the addition to Jacques will handle our first grade and kindergarten needs at least for the next decade. This assumes that we don't have a disruptive event such as the combination with another school district or the change to full-day kindergarten. I doubt that there will be a statewide move to full-day kindergarten any time soon since we are just now moving to implementing a half-day program.

Trying to forecast out even 10 years is difficult at best, and trying to go beyond that is probably hopeless. But based on everything that I know, we should be set for a while.

Vote for Article 1!!!

It is my opinion that article 1 is by far the best choice for providing space for a public kindergarten program in Milford. The key factor is that it saves $150,000 to $200,000 per year in unnecessary overhead costs associated with a stand-alone building. That is real money that needs to be preserved.

This article is also the one that is favored by the school district administration. The budget committee voted 8-1 in favor of this article. The school board was split on it, with Bert Becker and myself in favor of it (both public kindergarten supporters), Len Mannino and Bob Willette against it (both opposed to public kindergarten), and Peter Bragdon abstaining (he has a personal financial conflict of interest).

Please vote for Article 1 on the March 11th ballot, and bring a quality public kindergarten program to Milford at an affordable cost.