Reply to Big proposed class size increases for Title 1 and focus schools next year

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Reply to "Big proposed class size increases for Title 1 and focus schools next year"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So is the plan to make class sizes for each grade the same across all schools? Asking because the right hand column for FY28 on the table OP pointed to just has one class size and no FARMS tiers.[/quote]

My guess is that that's the number for the "base tier" (richest schools) in FY28-- their classes would shrink another kid smaller in K, 1, 2, and 3.  (If it applies to all schools it would be an increase for many of them and defeat the purposes of the new tiers. I think they just wrote it that way for simplicity.)

It may also mean that all the other schools also get a decrease of one kid in K-3 in FY28 but that's less clear. [/quote]

If your first guess is true that is crazy to me. MCPS gets over a hundred million dollars from the state based on the number of FARMS kids. That funding is not supposed to just supplant local funding. For decades class size reductions have been the main way they have spend (some of) of the state funding for FARMS kids. It has never been clear how they spend all of it and it seemed apparent they were using a significant amount of it to pad the general budget. Now the class size reductions for FARMS schools will be even less. So where is the FARMS money going???[/quote]

[Musses hair] Lessee, here...

$100M, huh?  Maybe 50 ES's with some qualifying FARMS status?  So $2M/school, if all spent there.

Six grades/school (K-5), so $333k for each grade.

Maybe 2 normally full classes/grade, on average?  Make that 3, adding one per grade, with fully burdened differential personnel (additional teacher salary + benefits) & facility (additional classroom, marginal school operations, etc.) costs of, say, $150k?  So $183k left.

3 paras across the 3 classrooms at around $60k total cost each?  Residual $3k * 6 grades * 50 schools = about $1M to central to support program administration?

Just guesses, here (e.g., no idea if additional paras would be in play along with the reduced class size), with plenty of wiggle room on either side.  Happy to entertain an alternate back-of-the-envelope.  I don't doubt there is some waste, but it's easy to throw around a big number like $100M as a headline target without first figuring the nuts and bolts of that which we might really be discussing.  Goodness knows that happens all the time with parallel complaints at a national level.[/quote]

Sorry, when I wrote the post above I hadn't had a chance to look at Taylor's proposed budget. The compensatory education grant is $206 million.

I honestly didn't follow everything you said, but I will trust past analyses by people who had their work vetted and trust that they are not spending all that money on class size reductions for Title 1 and focus schools now and are certainly going to spend less of it next year.
https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/OLO/Resources/Files/2019%20Reports/OLOReport2019-14.pdf

Yes this report is several years old, unless you can point to any new spending on FARMS schools since then I dgaf[/quote]

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