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House Co-Sponsorship Memoranda
House of Representatives
Session of 2015 - 2016
Regular Session
MEMORANDUM
| Posted: | September 30, 2015 08:33 AM |
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| From: | Representative Dan Truitt and Rep. James R. Santora |
| To: | All House members |
| Subject: | Joint State Government Commission study of potential school redistricting savings |
| In the near future, we will introduce a resolution directing the Joint State Government Commission to conduct a comprehensive study to determine the potential savings, by school districts, that would adopt a different methodology for conducting their redistricting. As many of you already know, redistricting is performed infrequently by school districts because it is an expensive and stressful process. Trying to transfer large groups of families from one school to another causes emotional distress for the families and political distress for school boards. An engineer and logistics expert in our area showed us how existing, modern, logistics software tools could be used to identify opportunities to rebalance class sizes across school districts and shorten bus rides by transferring a smaller number of students between schools. He suggested that school districts should redistrict more frequently, transferring only handfuls of students each time they do it and they should focus more on balancing classrooms as opposed to balancing buildings. In some cases, the result might be that two students in different grades, living in the same neighborhood, might go to different schools. While it might seem that this will increase transportation costs, these added transportation costs can easily be offset by other savings, including reduced transportation costs in other areas and the need for fewer classrooms. Class sizes would also be more uniform. Ex: Instead of having 13 fourth graders in one classroom in one school and 27 fourth graders in one classroom in another building, you would end up with 20 fourth graders in both classrooms. This is more fair for the students and the teachers. This is already being done successfully by a very small number of districts in our state. We should encourage more districts to try this. If the use of these software tools could eliminate just one classroom in each school district, we could save $50 Million across the state. However, we prefer not to mandate school districts to do anything. So instead, we propose to have the Joint State Government Commission run the analysis for each school district and let the district’s decide whether or not the potential savings justify changing the way they handle their own redistricting. We hope you will join us in sponsoring this resolution that could lead to significant cost savings for our school districts. A copy of the resolution is enclosed |
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| View Attachment | ||
Introduced as HR556