Guest Opinion | Patrick Cahalan: PUSD’s Secondary Problem

One of the driving factors in operating any large organization, whether it be a K-12 educational facility or a university or a private corporation is the cost of overhead. In any organization, a certain amount of money needs to be spent to provide whatever services are the primary mission of the organization, and a certain amount of money needs to be spent on “keeping the lights on”. Utilities, support personnel who do IT work or work in HR, etc.

A certain amount of that overhead is inevitable, no matter what sort of organization you run, but there are others that are tied to decisions regarding where you put your facilities and how many of them you have.

In two decades of involvement in the district, as a parent, site volunteer, and then Board Member, it’s become undeniable to me that PUSD is spending too much of its money on too many locations, and it is impacting the student experience in many ways. That’s already true today, but we are on track to drop to 3000 high school students before 2034. This means the more facilities we keep open, the more of our bond money we are spending on what is effectively empty space, and the worse our overhead cost will be, as a percentage of the budget.

The cost of the status quo is giving none of our high school students real modern facilities, cutting electives, cutting sports programs, and reducing the support services that our most disadvantaged students need to be successful.

How can we address this?

1. One district-wide high school (roughly 4,000 students present-day). This would take a significant amount of the bond, and the district would have to pick one of the two largest school sites (Muir or PHS) to make it work. We could invest for truly world class facilities at that site, including five-sport athletic facilities (basketball, aquatics, football, baseball, soccer). Logistically this would be complex, and involve many intermediate issues of shuffling students around while the construction was underway, since we have to continue teaching students while this campus is being rebuilt. The single biggest advantage here is that we are no longer pitting school communities against each other for enrollment, and no matter how much farther enrollment drops we no longer have to worry about declining enrollment issues at multiple sites resulting in service disparities between the sites.

2. Two high schools (roughly 2,000 students per school). The obvious default locations are PHS and Muir, but an argument could be made for Blair because the Allendale campus could be incorporated, increasing the square footage to be comparable to the two larger schools. If we chose this option, the two schools would both be reasonably nice, albeit not as nice as the single facility in option 1, and we would have to spend somewhere between 30-50% more than we would with a single facility. We will be back to tension on “staffing for electives” vs. “having constrained options” in the next decade, though, as both of the high schools will be under 2,000 students. There are, however, advantages to more than one site, including giving parents and families two choices, and geographic coverage, which cuts down on transportation costs.

3. Three 6-12 facilities. This option is most agreeable to both Blair and Marshall parents (who have already opted into a 6-12 model) but won’t be agreeable to the folks who want a true middle/high school experience. It would also necessitate closing all of the dedicated middle schools and eliminating the 6-8 at McKinley to make the numbers pencil out, and would also be more expensive than option #2. This might work, in spite of the total number of secondary schools, as the merger of the middle school population goes a long way towards solving our “not enough kids on the site” problem, but more on that below.

It’s important to remember that the district is capped out on bond authorization. We cannot authorize more bonds, for quite some time, and thus the money that we currently have is *all that we have* for re-engineering the district. Every dollar we spend on facilities at site X is a dollar we don’t have to spend elsewhere. The state bond fund is not going to come to rescue us.

I feel very, very strongly that it would be a major disservice to the students in this district for the next three decades to not spend the facility money making facilities that will last. I have major difficulties with the “spread the money around so every site gets something” model some board members support.

We must put more students on the open sites. We can’t get there by recruiting students from private, we’ve been actively courting them for three decades now and we have not made serious progress.

No matter what else happens, if either Blair or Marshall exists as a going concern it must have enough high school students to offset the overhead impacts on the Master Schedule, meaning the schools must get significantly bigger at the 9-12 grade span. Neither Blair nor Marshall has enough students in the high school cohort to prevent class size ratio problems.

Whatever the current board chooses is going to be hard. It’s going to be harder still because nobody is going to be happy with the immediate impact.

Unless, of course, the Board continues to do nothing at secondary.

Patrick Cahalan, former PUSD Board Member.