The bogus claims regarding the “cost” of the Pearl Creek STEAM Charter School
Our School District is not a Prison System, and Charter Schools are Revenue Neutral
Among the many injustices surrounding the Pearl Creek saga, perhaps the most infuriating to me is the insidious claim that it will somehow “cost” the school district over two million dollars per year to “stand up” Pearl Creek STEAM Charter School (PCSCS), an absurd claim that appears to have been accepted as real by all parties in this week’s legal proceedings. If you will recall, this is more dollars per year than the district claimed it would save a couple of years ago by closing the school. The flawed logic behind this goes as follows (I use round numbers to keep the math simple):
200 students that were to enroll in Pearl Creek are currently in other district schools.
Between state BSA and borough contributions, each of those students comes with $10K.
200 x $10K means opening Pearl Creek will cost the district’s other schools $2M.
Q.E.D. (that’s what we used to put at the end of high school geometry proofs).
What’s wrong with this? The borough and the school district are not closed systems. Treating them as such is not just mildly inaccurate, it is the difference between reality and magical thinking. There are about 16,000 school age children in the borough, about half of whom are elementary school age, all of whom have parents with agency. In other words, those 200 students are only 2.5% of the elementary-school age population. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of parents every year deciding whether to take a job elsewhere or stay in Fairbanks, and similar numbers deciding whether to move their family to Fairbanks. If just a small percentage of those families are favorably impressed by the school district increasing school choice options and decide to live in Fairbanks, then the supposed “cost” of opening Pearl Creek Charter is negated. Every child that goes to Pearl Creek rather than leaving the district is also a child likely to end up in a public secondary school. Conversely, every family that sees a school district dead set against anything but tiny, niche charter schools and thus chooses to move away causes the district to not only lose that child, but also siblings who might be in a non-charter school. That family’s local friends might now consider leaving town. A military family might tell other military families to avoid deploying here. Of course, moving in or out of the borough is not the only option for families. There are private schools and a variety of non-district homeschool options.
The closed-system logic is why five years of school consolidation has completely failed by the school district’s own standards. Remember, the entire premise, stated repeatedly, was that by closing schools we would achieve savings in efficiency by raising occupancy from under 70% to 85% in our school buildings. Believing in the closed system model, the district and school board conducted the school-closing process in the most ham-fisted, belligerent, unethical way possible, concluding with telling parents to quit whining and accept their new reality. In their minds nothing was going to change except for students being redistributed to new schools, so what did it matter how the students and parents were treated.
In reality, more children have left the school district than the populations of the closed schools. Our non-charter schools are still at under 70% capacity, there’s just a whole lot fewer of them, now.
