hard deadlines

The Sakonnet Times has posted the obituary for Jay Humphrey; calling hours this weekend, service 1pm Monday from the United Congregational Church in Little Compton. Guest book and information at the Waring-Sullivan Home.

On March 5, I sent an e-mail to Brown professor Kenneth Wong, who developed the RI Dept. of Education (RIDE) proposed funding formula, asking him to explain some of the calculations. Last night, I got this note from RIDE.

From: "Cole, Kristen"
Date: March 11, 2010 7:50:29 PM EST
To: jmcdaid@torvex.com
Subject: FW: Request for information

Hi John -

Dr. Wong forwarded your email to me? There is a handout on RIDE's website that explains the state share ratio and provides the supporting documentation. Please go to www.ride.ri.gov and click on the Proposed Funding Formula link on the home page.

Kristen Cole
RI Department of Education

I thought that since Dr. Wong wasn't too busy to site down and explain his formula to the editorial board of the student newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald, that he might take the time to answer substantive questions from a reporter in one of the communities actually impacted by his formula.

Guess I was wrong.

The Portsmouth Concerned Citizens (PCC) ejected a Portsmouth Eagle Scout from their monthly meeting last week, according to a published report in today's Newport Daily News. Portsmouth High School senior Andrew Kelly, in a letter to the editor of the Daily News (reprinted below), questioned the PCC's non-partisan stance: "Shouldn't [they] welcome an open-minded citizen interested in bipartisan solutions?"

According to the Daily News, the group's president, Larry Fitzmorris (who is also listed as executive vice-president of the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition on their web site) claimed it was a "philosophical issue, not a party issue," but elsewhere in the article says that Kelly "is associated with what looks like the core of the Democratic Party." Sounds pretty non-partisan to me.

What can I say? Hey, Andrew, welcome to the club. I tried to join the PCC three years ago, but I didn't even make it inside the door. (See here, here, and here.) I guess their big tent (get it — tent?) can't accommodate quite so much diversity as one would expect.

As Larry told the Providence Journal back when they still covered Portsmouth, "I don’t recall us ever claiming to represent all the taxpayers of the town."

Here's Kelly's letter to the editor:

On Tuesday, March 2, I was kicked out of a meeting of the Portsmouth Concerned Citizens and I wanted to share my concerns.

I was invited to attend by one of the leaders of the PCC because of my interest in town affairs, but when I arrived at the meeting at the Anthony House on Middle Road, I was asked to leave because, it was said, I am a Democrat and running for office. Which I informed them is wrong. I am a Democrat, but while I am considering running for the Portsmouth School Committee, I have not declared my candidacy.

I am a lifetime resident of Portsmouth, have attended Portsmouth public schools, and will graduate from PHS in June. I am an Eagle Scout, an assistant Scout master for a local Boy Scout Troop, a Cub Scout Den Leader, the National Art Honors Society Historian at PHS and a parishioner at St. Anthony’s Church. I am the youth representative on the Portsmouth Economic Development Committee and I serve on the leadership board of a local non-profit organization. I have attended numerous School Committee meetings since my sophomore year when I successfully convinced the committee to revisit a proposed bus pass policy. I am, by any definition, a concerned citizen of Portsmouth.

And according to the PCC’s website “We are bipartisan and do not represent the views of any political party. We work to improve openness, efficiency and honesty of our town government.” I thought for sure that I fit all of those, given the amount of time I volunteer to community organizations.

As an Eagle Scout, I am deeply dedicated to honesty, openness, and efficiency. If they truly are a bipartisan organization, why would someone be excluded because they are a Democrat or might be a candidate for office? Shouldn't an organization with their stated goals welcome an open-minded citizen interested in bipartisan solutions?

Is the PCC really what they say they are? Form your own opinion.

Andrew Kelly
Portsmouth

Full disclosure: I am most likely one of those folks thought of as the "core of the Democratic Party." Whatever the heck that means.

Empty basketball court in Island Park

All the homemade skate rails and ramps have been removed from the basketball court in the Island Park playground. Today, there is only a smooth, empty asphalt surface.

But the process did not go without a hitch. According to Portsmouth Police Chief Lance Hebert, folks who had built the gear were advised by the town that it had to be removed due to liability concerns. As the ramps were being removed last night, Hebert said "officers responded for a disturbance."

One witness told me that a group of youths were congregating on Highland Avenue expressing their dissatisfaction at this turn of events. Hebert said, "A complaint was filed by a person who lives adjacent to the park which is being investigated by police at this time."

"Our main goal as a Police Department is to keep the peace in that area as best we can," Hebert said.

I join Chief Hebert in urging that all sides to keep this process peaceful and respectful of our neighbors and our community. There is a political process underway, and if people want to speak out, I would urge them to continue to put pressure on the Town Council.

For my part, I agree that liability concerns need to be addressed. However, this turn of events makes me question whether a long-term solution — like a promised facility in the old Town Dump — represents a complete answer, since it would be years off. That doesn't meet the needs of our kids right now.

Jay Humphrey, local businessman and past president of the Portsmouth Public Education Foundation (PPEF), passed away yesterday, according to an e-mail from current PPEF president Helen Furriel.

Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this sad time.

According to the Providence Business News, the folks at the free local news site Newport Now have bought the paper Newport This Week from East Bay Newspapers.

Congratulations and best wishes for great online-hardcopy synergies!

Alert reader davidc (THANKS!) pointed out that RIDE has posted backup documents to a new education funding formula page here, and I'm happy to report that we now have enough information to calculate the state share (I've updated the GoogleDocs spreadsheet with this info, and will be using references to that worksheet as I go through the explanation below.

But first, a couple of comments. Although I had sent an e-mail to Deputy Commissioner David Abbott (cc'ing Commissioner GIst) asking for the information, they did not have the courtesy of replying to let me know this had been posted. And while I don't know when the page went live, forensic examination of the supporting data PDF shows that it was created Thursday morning. (Line 1513 for those geeks playing along at home: /CreationDate(D:20100304155512Z)/Author(Beardsley, Andrew)/Creator(MicrosoftÆ Office Word 2007)/Producer(MicrosoftÆ Office Word 2007)/ModDate(D:20100304113952-05'00')

Second, I can't help but point out the glaring error in their document. On page 2, the total adjusted assessed value state-wide is this:

But on the following page, this is the number given:

Now I know that a single digit off on a hundred-billion-dollar number is insignificant. But if my son handed that in to his math teacher, Mrs. Warner, she'd circle it, and with good reason. If you want people to trust your math, getting the little things right — like having the same number on two successive pages — is kind of important. I mean, really. What would Arne Duncan say.

Third, and this is a subtle methodological point, but I question the amount of rounding that occurs in the RIDE calculations. Because both the percentage of students on Free and Reduced-Price Lunch (FRPL) and the Student Share Ratio for the Community (SSRC) get squared in the formula, small changes get magnified. They also appear to have rounded the final State Share number. I've included columns in the spreadsheet indicating the differences between calculated values and RIDE's rounding. It's mostly in the tenths-of-a-percent, but when we're talking about allocating taxpayer dollars, it doesn't cost RIDE any extra to use a couple of decimal places.

At a high level, the formula is fairly straightforward. RIDE's consultant at Brown developed a "core instructional amount" based on an average of four New England states (RI, MA, CT, and NH). This value, $8,295, includes instructional costs designated by the Basic Education Program (BEP). It does NOT, however, represent the cost of actually educating students, since RIDE acknowledges that it does not include teacher retirement, group home aid, food service, transportation, safety, building upkeep, utilities, maintenance, debt service, capital projects, out of district tuition and transportation, and non-public textbooks.

In other words, this number represents only some theoretical ideal, not the actual cost of opening the doors of a school building. Let's just be very clear on that.

Now, let's see how much of this number RIDE considers the state should be providing. To get there, we need to multiply $8,295 by the number of students in the district, which is referred to as the Resident Average Daily Membership (RADM). To that number, we need to add an adjustment for the number of students in the district who are receiving Free or Reduced-Price Lunch (FRPL) which RIDE is using as a proxy for the percentage of the population who are economically challenged. RIDE assumes that these students will need extra help, so they add a factor of 40% of the core $8295 for each FRPL student.

So the total amount the district "should" be spending is RADM * 8,295 + (FRPL * (8,295 *.4))

If we put in the numbers for Portsmouth, with a RADM of 2,657, we get a result of $22,879,269. The obvious question — how to reconcile this with our current school budget of $35,746,286 — does not seem to enter into RIDE's calculations. They are not talking about the cost of putting the teacher in front of a room that has heat, light, and buses to get the kid there. But wait, it gets better.

The heart of the state funding formula is a quadratic mean, which weights the community's ability to pay (the State Share Ratio for the Community, or SSRC) and the percentage of students on FRPL.

To get the value to plug into SSRC, we need to do some further math with a number called the Equalized Weighted Assessed Valuation, or EWAV, divided by the number of students in the district.

So for Portsmouth, SSRC = 1-(0.5 * ($4,549,808,726/2,657)/(141,599,970,284/139,934) or 15.39% (That's cell S40 in the spreadsheet, RIDE rounds this.) Now, we plug that into the quadratic mean. Since Portsmouth has 1,270 K-6 students of which 122 receive FRPL, our percentage is 9.61 (another one of the things that RIDE rounds).

Therefore, state share equals the square root of (15.39^2 + 9.61^2 / 2) or 12.98% (cell U40).

Now, we can use that percentage, with the "core" cost and we'll find that the state would contribute $2,968,986. I won't make you do the math: that means local taxpayers need to pony up $32,777,300.

So you take a hypothetical number (which acknowledges that it does not represent the full cost of educating a child) and then jump through a series of mathematical hoops, rounding here and there, and come up with a percentage that bears no relationship with the actual per-pupil costs in a district. I hope that RIDE can forgive me if I seem unconvinced of the "fairness" of this.

Note: A reader suggested calculating the percentage of the total cost the state would be picking up: 9.06%.