What Has Led To Redistricting? The New Harriton High School is Too Big and Too Expensive

You may recall this headline exclaimed repeatedly by citizens warning about the LMSD “Modernization Plan.”  Now, as the real costs of that plan tally, some portions of the community are getting angry.  With good reason; they’ve been duped!

This latest “cost” was obvious to anyone who was paying attention.  What happens when one of the two equally-sized schools is located on the border of the least densely populated side of town?  You guessed it, a long bus ride that for some will pass right by a closer school. 

But there is a simple solution to the redistricting issue.  Don’t do it!  We don’t have to because the new Lower Merion High School is big enough to take the same percentage of our high school students as it always has.  In fact, both schools are that big.

As a co-founder of Budget Reform for Student Learning (BRSL), I know too well what led to the current redistricting debate.  Had this issue been tackled first, as it should have been, the School Board knew it could be forced to put its plan to a vote.

The reason we are being told we have to redistrict for two equally sized schools at this late date is related to what the School Board did to ensure they could construct two new schools without giving the voters a state-required choice.  I have gone on in these pages before about how the previous Board and Superintendent:

·       misled the Community Advisory Committee (CAC) by making up PA Dept. of Ed. (PDE) site size regulations that never existed;

·       provided the CAC with cost estimates that made two equally sized schools appear to cost nearly the same as one; Click Here for More 

·       moved Harriton ahead of LMHS realizing that if the redistricting debacle surfaced before Harriton was built, they may be forced to get voter approval;

·       avoided an Act 1 budget vote by overtaxing the public $20.1M as additional down payment moneys to keep under the vote trigger, but insisting that the money was needed for student programs; Click Here for More

·       For full detail of these and other issues raised by BRSL, please read the other blogs on this site or use the quick links in the left hand column.

But, the reason the schools are so large results from the way the previous Board and Superintendent subverted Act 34.  By paying the architects to perform periodic Act 34 “tests,” they systematically adjusted the school size and features to take advantage of the PDE’s historic failure to enforce the square-foot-per-enrolled-student requirements of the law.  This well-known PDE loophole allowed them to avoid an Act-mandated vote, but it also resulted in the schools exceeding the size needed by a significant margin.  LMSD pushed the limits so far that for the first time the PDE is actually holding hearings on the matter.

As a result of adjusting size to avoid a referendum, during the design process, the combined cost/size of the two schools approved by the CAC grew from $151M for 588,616 square feet to over $250M and 666,000 square feet.  On a per student basis, the New Harriton and Lower Merion High Schools are undisputedly the largest and most expensive schools ever constructed in the US. Using PDE’s standards, each has a Rated Pupil Capacity of over 1,800 students! That’s space for 1,100 more students than we have.

The current student/program mix between the two schools has worked fine for years.  The new LMHS is large enough to maintain that mix.  By keeping the status quo, we can keep our community intact and avoid a historic increase in operating costs.  Savings that will come in handy, given that a new teacher contract is on the horizon, a massive increase in teacher pension fund contributions is due in 2012, we just incurred construction debt of historic proportions, and property values are falling in proportion to the rise in property taxes.  If we don’t take action to cut costs now, student programs will surely suffer.

The downside is that we will have to deal with the fact that the new Harriton is simply too big.  It’s not too late to cut costs by either leaving the third floor as open, minimally finished space, or by using portions of the building for other township uses, such as a community center from which all taxpayers could benefit.  By moving the DAO to Harriton, LMHS could hold even more students.  A little innovation could garner many more dollars for our children’s future.  

To do this, the LMSD Board will have to swallow its pride and admit to either their deceit, or at least their blind reliance on the previous Superintendent and Business Manager that carried out their mandate.  This may be too much to ask, having experienced first hand their hard-fought, taxpayer-funded campaign to defeat BRSL when we raised these concerns more than two years ago.  Remember that they went against the will of the community then.  Click Here  They will do it again!

For more facts read the history of the high school debacle in all of the blogs on this website. Or, if you are interested in forcing the Board to settle the redistricting issue first, email BRSL at lmsdbudget.reform@verizon.net.

Bill Manginelli, Narberth