How Much Is Too Much To Pay For A School?

The RFK complex follows on the heels of two other LA schools among the nations 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.

All those amenities add up to an enormous price tag, which works out to about $250,000 per pupil. That $578 million cost is more expensive than the Bird's Nest stadium built for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China, which cost $500 million. It's also significantly more expensive than the $400 million home of the Denver Broncos, Invesco Field at Mile High.
Critics say the school is a luxury that the Los Angeles Unified School District cannot afford. The district has a $640 million budget shortfall, and over the past two years, 3,000 teachers have been laid off. The district has even proposed shortening the school year by six days to save money.

Originally Posted by Camp David

If the Los Angeles Unified School District and the California voters foolishly approved a $578,000,000 high school that's their problem; I don't really care.

In Los Angeles, officials say the new schools were planned long before the economic pinch and are funded by $20 billion in voter-approved bonds that do not affect the educational budget.
Still, even LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines derided some of the extravagance, noting that donations should have been sought to fund the RFK project's talking benches commemorating the site's history.

After buildings were demolished at the site of the 2,400-student Roybal school, contaminated soil, a methane gas field and an earthquake fault were discovered.
Over 20 years, the project grew to encompass a dance studio with cushioned maple floors, a modern kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven, a 10-acre park and teacher planning rooms between classrooms.
The 1,700-student arts school was designed as a landmark, with a stainless steel, postmodernistic tower encircled by a rollercoaster-like swirl, while the RFK site involved 15 years of litigation with historic preservationists and Donald Trump, who wanted to build the world's tallest building there. The wrangling cost $9 million.

James Sohn, the district's chief facilities executive, said the megaschools were built when global raw material shortages caused costs to skyrocket to an average of $600 per square foot in 2006 and 2007 -- triple the price from 2002. Costs have since eased to $350 per square foot.

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.
Nationwide, dozens of schools have surpassed $100 million with amenities including atriums, orchestra-pit auditoriums, food courts, even bamboo nooks. The extravagance has led some to wonder where the line should be drawn and whether more money should be spent on teachers.

Originally Posted by tonton

Far better an inner city school than this!

CUT MILITARY SPENDING NOW!

Recovery Act school construction bonds provide low-cost borrowing to build and upgrade schools, which is a win-win for communities across the country," said Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin. "The projects funded with these bonds create jobs today building modern schools to prepare our kids for the global economy of tomorrow.

2010 Allocations to States of Volume Cap for Qualified School Construction Bonds

California\t720,058,000

2010 Allocations to Large Local Educational Agencies of Volume Cap for Qualified School Construction Bonds

California\tLos Angeles Unified\t290,180,000

The following analysis estimates the cost to build a high school with face brick with concrete block back-up / steel frame using US National Average costs from 2008 RSMeans cost data. Cost Per Sq Ftt$141.94

The following analysis estimates the cost to build a jr high school with face brick with concrete block back-up / steel frame using US National Average costs from 2008 RSMeans cost data. Cost Per Sq Ftt$147.63

The following analysis estimates the cost to build an elementary school with face brick with concrete block back-up / steel frame using US National Average costs from 2008 RSMeans cost data. Cost Per Sq Ftt$144.48

LOS ANGELES
Elementary>>>>>> Jr. HS>>>>>>High School
$165.62/sq ft>>>$168.95/sq ft>>>$164.43/sq ft

James Sohn, the district's chief facilities executive, said the megaschools were built when global raw material shortages caused costs to skyrocket to an average of $600 per square foot in 2006 and 2007 -- triple the price from 2002. Costs have since eased to $350 per square foot.

LOS ANGELES The site where Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated opened Monday as a $578 million complex of public schools for thousands of students after years of disputes over historic preservation.

"They made it like a museum," said Maria Vilar, mother of a fifth-grader.

The long-running effort to turn the location into an educational complex involved disputes with conservationists who wanted to save the historic hotel from demolition.

The Kennedy family opposed efforts to save the hotel pantry where the senator was shot by Sirhan Sirhan. The pantry was disassembled and placed in storage.

The Ambassador Hotel opened in 1921 and became a focal point of Los Angeles culture. Movie stars and presidents from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon stayed there.

The campus, which comprises six independent schools, will unlock its doors to about 3,700 students as a maelstrom of issues buffets the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest school system. The school's delayed Sept. 13 opening is the consequence of budget cuts that shortened the school year, while classes here and in other school systems will be larger because of teacher layoffs.

Amid the turmoil, the RFK complex is, for the district, a rebuke to those who question its ability to do things right. Like the flagship arts high school downtown, the facility was intended as both school and statement. The school also will provide a critical test case for key district reforms.

The design also permits community access to the library, the two gyms, the 25-meter pool, playing fields, a broad front lawn and a school auditorium like no other. The intimate, 585-seat house is embellished with a richly textured Moroccan motif of reds, yellows and browns and a dark ceiling illuminated with pinpricks of light like distant stars.

"The RFK school site will be a beacon," she predicted.

Originally Posted by BR

It's fair to say that although this school is incredibly expensive, on the scale of government waste it's rather miniscule and at least it's for education. It's called putting things into perspective. .....

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is the largest (in terms of number of students) public school system in California. It is the 2nd largest public school district in the United States. Only the New York City Department of Education has a larger student population. During the 2007-2008 school year, LAUSD served 694,288 students, and had 45,473 teachers and 38,494 other employees.[1]

It is the second largest employer in Los Angeles County, after the county government.[2] The total school district budget for 2009-2010 is $7.3 billion.[3] In enrollment breakdown by ethnic group, 73% of its students were of Hispanic origin and 11% of its students were African American. European American students comprise 9% of the student population, while Asian American students comprise 4%; students of Filipino origin form 2% of the student population. Native Americans and Pacific Islanders together are less than 1%[1]

The school district consists of Los Angeles and all or portions of several adjoining Southern California cities. LAUSD has its own police force, the Los Angeles School Police Department, which was established in 1948 to provide police services for LAUSD schools.[4] The LAUSD enrolls a third of the preschoolers in Los Angeles County, and operates almost as many buses as the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.[5] The LAUSD school construction program rivals the Big Dig in terms of expenditures, and LAUSD cafeterias serve about 500,000 meals a day, rivaling the output of local McDonald's restaurants.[5]

The LAUSD has a reputation for extremely crowded schools, high drop-out [2] and expulsion rates, low academic performance in many schools, poor maintenance and incompetent administration.[6][7] Bond issues and ambitious renovation programs have not uniformly eased these conditions.[8] As part of its school-construction project, LAUSD opened two high schools (Santee Education Complex and South East) in 2005 and four high schools (Arleta, Contreras Learning Complex, Panorama, and East Valley) in 2006.[9]
In 2007, LAUSD's dropout rate was 26 percent for grades 9 through 12.[10]

The Ambassador Hotel (Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools)
Another controversial project has been the development of The Ambassador Hotel property on Wilshire Boulevard in densely populated Koreatown. The LAUSD fought over the defunct landmark with among others Donald Trump, who later walked away from it, with the legal battle dating back to 1989 . In 2001, the LAUSD finally obtained legal ownership of the property. Plans to demolish the building, the site where Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot, were met with strong opposition from preservationists. Kennedy's family supported the demolition plans. In August 2005, LAUSD settled a lawsuit over the matter that had been filed by several preservationist groups: most of the Ambassador complex would be destroyed, but the Paul Williams-designed coffee shop and the Coconut Grove nightclub would be preserved[citation needed], with the Grove serving as the auditorium for a new school to be built on the site. Demolition began in late 2005, and the last section of the hotel fell on January 16, 2006. The first new school on the site is scheduled to open in 2009.

The project construction became the most expensive school in the United States. The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools opened in September 2010 at the cost of $578 million to serve 4,200 K-12 students. Costs in 2010 were $350 per 1 square foot (0.093 m2). The district attributes high costs to material, land prices, seismic code, and unionized labor.[27

About 150 Los Angeles Unified School District employees and their school-age children rallied outside a shuttered campus Wednesday against state budget cuts that have shortened the academic year and pushed back the start of school.

The district has slashed seven days from the academic year in its effort to eliminate a $640-million deficit, a move critics say will lead to crowded classrooms and reduced student services. Although school traditionally starts the week of Labor Day, the date has been pushed back to Sept. 13.

SIGNIFICANT FINDINGS
Following are the significant findings of this preliminary examination as they relate to each of the dependent variables achievement, violence and cost.

Finding I Small schools have significantly higher test scores than large schools.
One task for this project was to estimate relationships of school size with test scores on High School Proficiency Tests (HSPT). The tests measure student success in mastering math, reading, and writing skills respectively.

Finding II Small schools have significantly less violence than large schools.
The size of district schools is positively correlated with the concentration of student violence and school crime in a given district. This result is analogous to prior research on school segregation. This study shows that school size is also significantly correlated with the concentration of violence and crime in one district versus others. The size of the average school in each district is significantly correlated with violence and overall criminal incidents for districts serving a majority high-school students.
Using a tipping point for school size of 1000 pupils, small schools on average (mean and median) experience between 29 to 40 percent fewer incidents of violence than do all of the schools in the sample. Schools with more than 1000 pupils experience between 58 and 108 percent more incidents of violence.

Finding IV Small schools have significantly higher value per dollar spent than large schools.

Friedkin and Necochea launched a bold new genre of empirical research in 1988. They grounded their predictions about the effects of size on prior research into generic organizational behavior.

They found that large schools and large districts and especially poverty districts - have more students with special needs and behavior problems and culture of poverty traits. More importantly, they controlled for socio-economic status and measured the independent impact of school size and district size on test scores. They found favorable academic outcomes from smaller districts and from smaller schools, at least at lower grades.

In accord with their contingency theory, small schools in poverty communities especially helped academic test scores. As large schools proliferated, and average size increased, test scores went down, especially in communities where parents had little education and low occupational status.
A growing number of subsequent studies by Craig Howley and Howard Bickel showed similar results for states besides California.

They have focused on heavily rural and poor states in the West and South. They report that a combination of large schools and extreme poverty, measured variously, are negatively correlated with academic test scores especially in lower grades.