Reply to Concerned about lower spending on Regular Kids in FCPS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Over the past ten years FY08 - FY18 (note fiscal years end/begin June 30)

Spending on General Education students (this includes ESOL) has[b] declined[/b] by 7% in real (inflation adjusted) dollars.  In FY08 FCPS spent $11,400 on a GenEd student - in real terms today that is $10,600.

Spending on Special Education students has[b] increased[/b] by 9% in real (inflation adjusted) dollars.  In FY08, FCPS spent $20,200 on a SpecEd student - in real terms today that is $21,800.

There were 4,015 unaccompanied children resettled in Fairfax County over the past 4 years (https://www.acf.hhs.gov/orr/unaccompanied-children-released-to-sponsors-by-county).  At an average cost of $16,390 - ($12,640 avg cost/GenEd student + $3,750 ESOL expense) that is an incremental cost to FCPS of at least $66M every year.

Fairfax County is very generous to Special Needs children and to refugees and immigrants - and I am proud of that generosity.

Is there a point at which spending differences on various groups becomes inequitable or inappropriate and/or unsustainable?  Are people leaving FCPS (and Fairfax County) to go to Loudoun, Arlington, Montgomery Counties seeking more money spent on Regular Kids?  Loudoun population grew 3% last year by 11,386 residents - Fairfax added zero.

Can FCPS become ever more efficient, to help ensure that the money that is available is effectively spent?  If people move out and businesses don't relocate here (or move away), the 'burden' of paying for school falls on fewer and fewer households.   House values in McLean, Great Falls and Vienna are declining - in much of the rest of the County, house values are stagnating.

How can we, as a community, balance the needs of various groups and remain an attractive option for people looking for good schools for their kids, reasonable taxes, good services, safe neighborhoods and a place they might be able to retire?  What choices must be made - especially when the economists and budget analysts look forward and estimate future growth at 2% per year?

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I am actually OK with spending on special needs kids and esol.  [b]I DO resent spending on all the not so special snowflakes in AAP and language immersion.  [/b]But even more, I resent the spending on all the things that have nothing to do with kids.  Fairfax is not a lean mean fighting machine - it is a bloated bureaucracy where teaching and learning are at the bottom of a very large, fat totem pole.   Take a look at admin salaries, and the salaries of the gadjillion people who work in non-teaching jobs in non-school buildings.  No one talks about cutting them, because you don't see them or know about them, and they are pretty much the ones in charge of deciding who gets cut.  And how about the money Fairfax pays to outside consultants?  It pays enough to contractors to fund many teaching positions, and moreover, a lot of the time those contractors are doing things that FCPS didn't really need.  They have whole departments where they pay people to be in charge of developing curriculum, but then they hire an outside company and pay hundreds of thousands for a group of outsiders who are no more qualified than FCPS teachers and administrators to come in and tell us what to do.  If anyone is going to cut services for children, we need to first shine a light on central admin and contractors.  That's where the waste and inefficiency are.[/quote] the problem with your statement above is that it implies those "snowflakes" are special. What is unfortunate about AAP is that there are many many children who would benefit from the curriculum but don't get it because they just missed the cutoff. And with immersion, there are just limited slots because the county hasn't expanded the program. In both cases, an expansion would benefit all children. We should think about how we can give all children these opportunities and stop thinking about who is and who isn't benefitting. All kids should benefit from these opportunities if they want them.[/quote]

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