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Board members said during a workshop session Wednesday that even with the number of open enrollment and Chapter 220 students being capped to drive down the student population, there are scenarios that could drastically inflate the student body.

"I don’t believe we should build schools that are too small for the population we have today," board member Steve Schwei said. "Our biggest city, Brookfield, is pretty built out right now, but it doesn’t strike me that they’ll want to stop growing. ... They’ll start growing vertically."

In other words, “Don’t confuse me with the facts.”

This is a common disease that preys on school board members. No known solutions exist, as perhaps it is genetic. The same malady (overprojections?) hit the Green Bay Area Public School District Board when a February, 2007 $69M Referendum was rejected by almost a 2 to 1 margin.

On the heels of the humbling defeat, the Green Bay School District formed a huge “Enrollment Task Force” to once again consider overcrowding needs. The task force, with 45 or 50 members represents almost every nook and cranny of the community. I call it “The Referendum Task Force” because that’s just what these groups do – they get together with the idea that they have to figure out how best to wine and dine the community into buying into one or more huge building or operations referendums.

Be assured, that’s probably what the Task Force will end up doing (in December, the Task Force’s Public Relations Subcommittee began meeting. Interesting…) – but they will first have done some pretty intense homework.

These folks in Green Bay have spent hours and hours and hours talking about enrollment projection methodology. (I attended one meeting and learned these folks are serious – and are working hard. Lots and lots of data. Lots and lots of discussion to sit through.)

It’s all pretty complex stuff, but suffice it to say the school district used “weighted averages” in the past which could easily be seen as favoring real estate developers and pro growth folks. The Task Force ultimately settled on using “Grade Progression Ratio (GPR) Methodology” for projections, and specifically nixed any use of weighted averages whatsoever.

Numbers (and words) mean something. Lo and behold, enrollment projections have declined from previous measures.

So… the Task Force has agreed on enrollment numbers – now they’ve got to agree on how to place all those bodies in available buildings. And several calculation methods/assumptions exist for those calculations! If you really want to go nuts with numbers, look at the graph on p. 69 of the Enrollment Projection Report. You’ll see that with all three different capacity assumptions, projected high school needs do not rise above current space available in the high schools. Imagine that.

Wasn’t it just last February the district was asking for a fifth high school?

The next referendum?
The next big issue to be tackled by the GB Task Force is a $65M+ backlog of maintenance projects. Wow. That’s huge. The next meeting of the Task Force is today, January 17, 4:30 p.m. at the District office, 200 S. Broadway, Green Bay. The public is welcome.

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