Sparta school board should seek ‘soft' alternatives

To the Editor: The Sparta school board is now considering other construction alternatives to building a new high school to alleviate overcrowding. In addition to “hard” alternatives that involve construction, they might also want to consider “soft” alternatives that do not involve new construction. Three that come to mind are: 1) spreading the school year over a full calendar year, 2) split sessions and 3) online learning. If low-cost soft alternatives can alleviate the overcrowding, they have the potential to substantially increase school productivity, i.e., output produced/input resources used. Student test scores/teacher labor hour and student test scores/sq. ft. building space are examples of partial productivity measures. In the educational setting, productivity measures are the only way to improve school operations so that Sparta citizens get more for their tax dollars. Soft alternatives are also flexible, and could be modified easily if a new school is built. Unfortunately, building new schools is likely to reduce productivity. As the CFT reported, educational research indicates that school facilities are not an important factor in student achievement; thus, adding new facilities is not likely to change output (e.g. average test scores) but it is likely to increase inputs (floor space per student). The net effect is to reduce productivity, which translates to higher costs and higher taxes. Consider, for example, the proposed $109 million new high school of 300,000 sq. ft. Currently we have about 450,000 sq. ft. or 110 sq. ft. per student for the 4,100 or so students in the district. The new school would add about 73 sq. ft. of new space input for each student, or a 66 percent increase. Based on the CFT report, the increase would translate into a 21 percent increase in the school’s yearly budget not including land or future maintenance costs. Since it is not likely there will be a commensurate increase in school output (e.g., average test scores), productivity would drop dramatically, Sparta would be in a worse competitive position, and taxpayers would be paying more for less productive schools. Whatever alternative the board finally chooses, perhaps it can forecast its impact on school productivity and make that data available to Sparta voters. James G. Root Sparta