LA's $578 million school
No comment...other than noting that the capital costs, alone, are about $140,000 per student.
From the AP's Christina Hoag through YahooNews...
Next month's opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will be auspicious for a reason other than its both storied and infamous history as the former Ambassador Hotel, where the Democratic presidential contender was assassinated in 1968.
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....
The RFK complex follows on the heels of two other LA schools among the nation's costliest — the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, which opened in 2008, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School that debuted in 2009.The pricey schools have come during a sensitive period for the nation's second-largest school system: Nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed. The district also faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing.
Los Angeles is not alone, however, in building big. Some of the most expensive schools are found in low-performing districts — New York City has a $235 million campus; New Brunswick, N.J., opened a $185 million high school in January....
posted by Eric Schansberg @ 6:22 AM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
A friend asked on Facebook about what a school should it cost. My reply:
Good questions. The quick answer is "a lot less, but I don't know how much". From the descriptions in the article, the cost is well outside the norm (although there are a handful of other, expensive examples).
The "should" also takes us to some other normative questions. If the school is fully financed locally, it's much easier to make the argument that they can spend what they want. But to the extent that the school is financed by the rest of the state, why should the middle-class in Lodi subsidize the wealthy in Beverly Hills?
In Louisville, the answer would be busing! We'd bus people from the wealthy/expensive area and send them elsewhere to improve diversity (of all sorts, I'm sure) and lower costs to boot.
There's also a question of "economies of scale" here. You'd think that a larger school would allow lower average costs-- both in terms of start-up and operating costs. I doubt that either is the case here. Playing with some numbers, a K-12 school with two classes of 25 students each would have 650 students. That's $91 million in start-up costs to go along with $250,000 to spend per classroom in operating costs. (assuming average operating costs-- probably a low-ball estimate in this case). That's a lot of hay.
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