Los Angeles Unveils $578 Million Public School 367
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an Associated Press report on next month's opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles:
"With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation's most expensive public school ever. The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of 'Taj Mahal' schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities. ... At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex's namesake, a manicured public park, and a state-of-the-art swimming pool. 'There's no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the '70s where kids felt, "Oh, back to jail,"' said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. 'Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.' ... Critics note that nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed, the district faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing."
it's all about accountability (Score:5, Informative)
i would be happy to pay teachers and school administrators 6 figure incomes, provided they churned out highly educated students
but i'm sorry, if a teacher sucks, they should be fired. and unfortunately, for standing against this common sense measure, the teacher's unions has made themselves an enemy of higher quality education
the usa will fall in this world while other countries with a better grasp on how serious education is will rise. there really is nothing wrong with spending a lot of money on education. but HOW that money is spent, without any accountability, is going to destroy this country
For better or worse... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Almost there.... (Score:3, Informative)
That was only for the rich. The average slobs went to a building just like we did - or no schooling at all.
Re:Hey big spender! (Score:5, Informative)
They needed a new school, and it had to deal with a number of special issues. For example,
It is not like this an investment property that they could keep putting off. So the costs of the materials, who knew how high it was going to go? It is not like they could have predicted it was going to go way back down. Also this is Los Angeles,
Construction costs at LA Unified are the second-highest in the nation -- something the district blames on skyrocketing material and land prices, rigorous seismic codes and unionized labor
It is not like they could build it anywhere they want. At the very least, it was an investment in our youth which is better than the proposed "Bridge to Nowhere" (price tag of $398 million).
Scale of LAUSD schools (Score:5, Informative)
Most people don't know that the LAUSD has been building schools at a completely insane pace. For the 15 years from 1997-2012, there has been an average of one new school opened every month! Sure, schools were neglected in the past, but there are tons of brand-new public schools in LA now.
Re:it's all about accountability (Score:2, Informative)
From my own experience, even if you catch a teacher flunking students intentionally you still can't get them fired. At least not if they have tenure.
You're confused. The problem is not one of flunking good students, it's one of passing poor ones to the next teacher in line, so they don't have to work on educating them.
Capital costs != operating costs. (Score:4, Informative)
Critics note that nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed, the district faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing.
Keep in mind that capital costs and operating costs are very different things when it comes to government accounting. Very often funds from higher levels of government are for capital costs only. Capital costs provide quick economic turnover which is something the government strives to do. If they hadn't built this school it doesn't mean the money would have gone to pay teachers. Not that I'm suggesting that the system is ok, just that you shouldn't necessarily criticize this particular project on these grounds.
Re:I can think of better uses for $500 million (Score:5, Informative)
I was the Board Chair and was directly involved two years ago in building a very nice public school facility, custom designed, for 650 students. It cost $7.5 million to build. Factor in different locational-related costs and that'd be $9 million in LA. $13,846/student.
You'd have better efficiencies of scale to take advantage of in building a 4200 student school, but we'll pretend it should only cost about the same per student. You could say the LA school is going to be even way nicer and cost twice as much and I might buy that argument. You could say they have a bigger bureaucracy to deal with and that's going to double the cost per student again, making it 4x as big and while that's quite a monument to bureaucratic inefficiency, it's certainly believable.
For this school to cost literally 10x as much per student ($137,619/student) as the school we built... there's a lot of graft and people and/or organizations being bought off at that price. There's no other rational explanation for this level of cost.
I mean really, for $124K EXTRA per student they should at least have dorm rooms with bathrooms, etc... on site for all the students and staff....
Re:State-of-the-Art Swimming Pool? (Score:4, Informative)
This may seem like nothing, but swimming is a sport of hundredths of a second, so every little bit counts. There have been quite a few changes since I was swimming competitively- swimmers no longer wear tiny speedos, starting blocks are shaped differently so that the "track" starts are more effective.. there are lots of little things like this that help the latest generation of swimmers go a couple fractions of a second faster than the last.
Re:It's so nice to see (Score:1, Informative)
It's been my experience in Southern California that the schools in wealthier neighborhoods are the most underfunded. My middle school, in one of the wealthiest areas in the state, couldn't afford to do *anything* without donations (at one point I believe donations were paying for some of the *salaries* there), and hadn't had any construction work in at least 20 years. The year before, my elementary school, in one of the poorest areas of the city, had enough funding to do things like fly us around the state.
My teacher there, who was high-profile within the district, had realized the discrepancy was large enough that it was better for her to have all her hand-chosen students driven from throughout in the city into a poor area than to teach in a wealthier area. of course, the administration and other students in a 95% non-white school didn't really appreciate the one class that was 90% white and asian and took all their funding from them, but the education was still better than we would have received elsewhere in the city.
Re:it's all about accountability (Score:1, Informative)
Let me know how that goes in 50 years time, when only the small percentage of children whose parents do this are running in fear from the mobs out for food.
Oh please! Insightful? We are in no danger of running out of food any time soon. If we do have food shortages, it will be nothing to do with your level of education, it will be a result of natural disasters or war which will affect everybody. In such a case of food supplies being disrupted it will be those with vegetable gardens and fruit trees that have food, regardless of education level.
Your education obviously didn't much for your ability to think.
Also (Score:5, Informative)
There's a reason for schools to look like thy do: It is a sturdy way to build things. When you have a building that is going to be frequented by a bunch of kids, who have no real investment or care in the well being of the building, it pays to build it to last. That means things like cinder-block walls (painted with heavy duty marine paint), tough, thin, carpet and so on. No it is not the peak of aesthetics but it does the job well. It takes abuse and hardly shows it. The high schools in my home town were like that and they aged very well. Sure it did have a "prison" look to it I guess but it held up to the students. You didn't have to repair holes in drywall all the time (hell I knocked a hole in my drywall and I try to be careful with that), you didn't have to repaint all the time, etc.
So it isn't just a matter of not spending a shit ton on a building, that could better go to teacher salaries and so on, but it is also a matter of longevity and maintenance. You want to put a building in place that you can use 30, 50, even 100 years from now all while being abused by students and you don't want to have to spend an arm and a leg doing it. That means some aesthetic compromises, but you'll get over it.
Hell I see that where I work (a university). My building is older, late 70s I think is when it was built. Main structure is brick, most floors are tough polyvinyl chloride, windows are a reasonable size and only in areas that matter and so on. It isn't the best looking building, but it holds up well. It can handle abuse (like having bigass servers moved around) well.
Next door is a new "dramatic" architecture building. Massive glass wall, exposed steel structure, etc. Ok cool... Except for all the problems. Cooling costs are astronomical, vandals brake the windows that make up the glass wall, the structure is rusting and so on. Has some ridiculous maintenance costs, many of which are simply being neglected.
Frankly, I'll take out "ugly" building. No it doesn't look as cool and the offices only have a normal window rather than a wall that is a window, but the damn thing holds up. It'll probably still be standing 30 years from now, not so sure about the building next door.
Re:it's all about accountability (Score:3, Informative)
So...your plan is to, what? Make sure each and every child has a college education? And what would they do with that? Haul our garbage?
For society to function we need a certain distribution of education. The largest portion being the highschool educated.
But hell, it's the latest fashion to run around screaming the sky is falling. So don't let me get in your way.