Reply to Ideas of How APS Can Solve High School Overcrowding

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Langley has been due for renovation for years. Not a good comparison.[/quote]   my point was that you can still have a quality education in an older building.  why can't we just spend money to provide adequate building space to all of our current students before getting any bells and whistles at a few or blowing it on gadgets?[/quote]

Things that don't drive building cost:

--Bells and whistles --> usually only account for about 1% of the cost of a building; eliminating them does not enable us build somewhere else. (Not saying we shouldn't be financially prudent, but it's not a capacity argument).
--Enrollment of illegal/out of district kids --> APS hired an investigator who has followed up on every credible report and has found fewer than 100 kids a year. Even if you think there are 3x as many as that, 300 illegal kids across the whole system is not creating our capacity issues and getting rid of these kids is not going to save us from having to build more schools.

Things that do drive building cost:

--Class size --> this has huge implications on how many classrooms we need to build (capital costs) and how many teachers we need to hire (operating costs). An external audit conducted several years ago estimated that Arlington could save tens of millions a year by increasing class size. 
--County requirements --> Arlington is an urban area and has to maximize the value of each inch of public land. School buildings and school fields are built to serve multiple purposes, which is more costly (e.g., turf fields, exterior lights) to build and to maintain that a building that just serves children during school hours. It is costly to make sure school buildings comply with the strict environmental, particularly runoff, requirements the county is subject to. New or expanded schools also require extensive changes to roads, sidewalks, and intersections, often for many blocks. [/quote]

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