11-18-04 Letter to School Board presented at the 11-18-04 meeting. The Board made no comment or even acknowledged the errors.
November 18, 2004
Acton-Agua Dulce Unified School District Dr. Wagner, Superintendent of Schools PO Box 68 Acton, CA 93510 Via Fax 661-269-0849 CC: E-mail to board
Tonight's School Board meeting agenda item 4.2, is a report generated by Dr. Wagner showing her spin on the savings by closing the Acton School and renting it out for 5 years, and supposedly saving $2.1 million.
The problem is that her spreadsheet doesn't add up. She adds the income from renting the school twice into each year's calculations. Removing her doubling of income, her claimed savings drops to $1.4 million.
But if Dr. Wagner takes off her rose-colored glasses and looks at the real cost of closing Acton School, including the moving of modulars, the additions of bathrooms, restoring CSR, accommodating 10% growth over five years and with the more valid assumption that she can't rent Acton as a school for delinquent students from Santa Clarita or Palmdale, she actually has $1 million loss from her plan.
If she would, in fact, properly configure the schools as many in the community have suggested, then we would save over five years $500,000. This plan would be Meadowlark School with all grades K through 3 having CSR, Acton School with grades 4 through 6, High Desert School with grades 7 through 9, and Vasquez High School with grades 10 through 12. This also would allow for 10% growth at each school.
Wagner's summary, which is 4.2 in the Board package shows:
Massive mathematical errors
Fails to recognize all of the costs triggered by closing
the Acton School
Assumes that the community will allow the Acton School to be
rented to a private company to house delinquent children from outside the
community or that some imaginary tenant would rent the school
We will not
have Class Size Reduction restored in classes K and 3, and
Assumes that there
will be no growth for the next five years.
One wonders how many of the other plans and decisions she makes and the Board rubber stamps are as wrong as this position is. For example, on the gym at Vasquez High School, she now claims, without any substantiation, that the gym cannot be approved and quotes the architect Tom Ballard to support her claim the gym is improper. But a review of the minutes of the School Board shows, in 1999, the same architect Tom Ballard supporting the purchase of the gym.
We can no longer trust anything this Superintendent claims without third party verification. She may very well be over-loaded fixing the abysmal test scores. She denies the test scores are a problem in her “happy talk” newsletter, which flies in the face of the results posted on the State's Department of Education website. The Board needs to appoint a committee to advise them on fiscal issues. A good start would be continuing the 7-11 Committee.
If the Board wants to continue supporting the irresponsible positions taken by Wagner, then I'm sure LACO will be interested in the real numbers and will take the District over and put a financial monitor in place. This will certainly fuel recall efforts.
It's your decision, do you want to work together or be taken over by the County of Los Angeles for incompetence?
Charles Brink