Capacity in the Controlled Choice Plan

 Looking over the capacity figures that were part of the Student Assignment Plan document presented to the board 2 weeks ago, I noticed some inconsistencies.  Last year, WCPSS came out with the 2010-11 Facility Utilization Report that listed the capacity for each school. 

Capacity is looked at in two ways:  Long Range School Campus Capacity (LRSCC) and Annual School Campus Capacity (ASCC).  LRSCC is the School Building Capacity plus the optimum number of temporary classrooms.  In other words, the capacity of the brick and mortar building plus the optimum number of trailers for that campus.  Now it could be argued that trailers are not ideal at all, but WCPSS has come up with a way to determine the optimum number for each campus.  You can find this info on page 6 of the Facility Utilization Report that I referenced above.

ASCC is the actual capacity of the school as we are using it today, which can include more than the optimum number of trailers.  In fact, most of our schools have more than the optimum number of trailers and some have less.  ASCC also includes adjustments for programs such as Pre-K and self-contained classrooms.  That part gets a little confusing and is really fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.

So what does this all mean in the Controlled Choice Plan?  The plan says that it uses LRSCC for the capacity numbers but the numbers they are using in the plan don't always match up to the 2010-11 Report.  I've asked WCPSS why this is but I haven't heard back from them yet.  Many of the school capacities only differ by less than 50 students but some differences are perplexing.  What is really concerning, however, is that many of our schools are well over the LRSCC yet we are now going to fill schools according to that lower number.

An extreme example is Durant Road Elementary.  The LRSCC in the 2010-11 Report is 935, in the Assignment Plan it is listed as 772, and the actual student population this year is 1030.  Those are some huge differences.  The Kindergarten capacity in the assignment plan is listed as 126 but there are 202 Kindergarteners at Durant Road this year.  That's 76 students who would have to go somewhere else in the new plan.  Where would they go?

This leads me to my first of two big questions regarding capacity in this assignment plan.  Will staff manipulate capacity numbers at certain schools in order to steer students where they want them to go?  Since this is getting a bit long, I'll answer this question in the next post.