4-21-00 Let's say you have a RV that you use to travel. You invite in a few friends to pay you an average daily allowance (ADA) and reduce the expense.
Because you decided to waste your income in the past years and now don't have enough money to operate the RV, you crowd all of your friends into a tiny camper to save money, and you ask your friends to drive 10 to 20 miles to reach where the camper is stored.
Your friends decide to not use the camper and cut their payments to you (ADA).
You can't sell it for anywhere near the replacement cost and a multi-year lease gives us small benefit compared to the ADA you had been receiving.
You now have the worst of both worlds. If your friends want to use the RV and you don't have it, you do not have the revenue to operate it.
In Acton and Agua Dulce there are enough students whose parents refuse to use the local school to fill the soon to be empty Acton school. Now we're giving hundreds of more parents the reason of a long forced bus trip and the elimination of class size reduction to pull even more students out of school.
The board cancelled class size reduction for third grade and kindergarten, raising class size from a maximum of 20 students to 30 or more students. 95+% of the cost of the added teachers is paid for by the state. The board cancelled the program because of a lack of classroom space, while closing many classrooms at the Acton School.
The Acton property is not a surplus site just because it can't be staffed due to a lack of money. The board's answer is to make a few dollars by leasing or selling the Acton school, killing class size reduction, and busing students to Agua Dulce. The few dollars earned will probably be wasted on the temporary Vasquez High School money pit. The board and the community must look further to save some real money.
1. A quarter of a million dollars a year is wasted on leasing temporary buildings at Vasquez.
2. $432,000 was spent for the pad and to erect the pipe barn, and $60,000 per year rent has been, and continues to be, wasted on it. There is no multi-purpose room/cafeteria and the students are forced to eat lunch outside. The students are not allowed to use the pipe barn gym to eat lunch on bad weather days, so they still are forced to eat outside in the rain.
3. We're informed that over $1 million a year is also wasted on competitive sports, which should be funded entirely by booster clubs and must not impact on academic funds. They in fact have a portable classroom used as a weight room by the athletic department, but there is no library or multi-purpose room.
4. Turn out the hated streetlights and kill the parking lot lights when the school is not in use.
5. Force the principal of Vasquez High to concentrate on academic affairs and stop being the coach. Lets give this school board an opportunity to fix these errors before calling for their recall.