From Harford County Government:
At a press conference in Bel Air this morning, Harford County Executive David R. Craig, joined by Superintendent of Schools Robert M. Tomback, as well as members of the County Council and Board of Education, announced that for the first time in two decades, the county now has no schools that exceed the Adequate Public Facilities capacity standard of 110 percent.
“This achievement has been a long time coming, and is the result of the determination and the cooperation of Harford County Government and Harford County Public Schools to address and alleviate overcrowding,” stated County Executive Craig. “I identified this as a priority of my administration when I first took office, and with the support of the County Council, we forward-funded a number of school construction projects that helped make this possible. While less than one-quarter of the nearly $300 million that the county funded for the construction of five schools has been reimbursed by the state, we know that it is an investment in our children that was worth the cost.”
“The school system was integral in identifying and completing projects to build, expand, and improve school facilities in our county,” County Executive Craig continued. “Furthermore, the comprehensive redistricting that the school system undertook after the infrastructure improvements were made, while difficult, has allowed for our classroom resources to be utilized more effectively and has created the best possible learning environment for our children. I thank the Superintendent, the Board of Education, and the County Council for their efforts in working to eliminate overcrowding in our schools.”
In 2005, the Board of Education began several initiatives, with the support of County Government, to provide additional building capacity and to balance the enrollments in the school district. Decisions were made to build the new Patterson Mill Middle-High School at a capacity of 1,600, and to replace Aberdeen, North Harford, Bel Air, and Edgewood high schools at 1,600 capacities. Additional capacity was also provided with the replacement of Deerfield Elementary School, the modernization of Joppatowne Elementary School and the construction of the new Red Pump Elementary School.
Concurrent with those efforts, the Board of Education initiated a comprehensive secondary school redistricting program, followed by a comprehensive elementary school redistricting program. The successful results of those efforts provided long-term relief of overcrowded schools at all levels. A byproduct of those efforts helped eliminate the need for more than 90 percent of the 66 existing relocatable classrooms that were used for capacity positioned at many of Harford’s schools.
“The willingness of the County Executive and the County Council to forward-fund the new and replacement school buildings in Harford County allowed us to increase our State Rated Capacity by approximately 4,000 seats,” said Superintendent Robert M. Tomback. “With the additional seats, the Board was able to shift students throughout the county resulting in a successful balance utilizing all available capacity in the most efficient manner possible.”
What happened to the report error corrections? Were they ever corected and the cause of the error found?
As of today, published enrollment figures do not appear to have been corrected or updated.
If the corrected figures have not yet been published, how can they make the claim?
jj- this press release is based on actual enrollment as of September 30, 2011. I was referring to enrollment projections in my comment above.
The last set of enrollment projections published by HCPS, based on actual 2009 enrollment and going out to 2017, are on the HCPS web site but those figures haven’t been updated since November 2009.
I don’t know if there will be revisions to previous projections but I was told that the long term projections based on 2011 enrollment would be published by HCPS last week.
Near term projections (for the next 3 years) are available in the most recent amendment to the Harford County Annual Growth Report and published here on The Dagger: http://www.daggerpress.com/2012/01/08/the-strange-case-of-the-missing-enrollment-projections-for-harford-county-public-schools/
I will be following up with HCPS on Monday to find out about the long term projections. Thanks for your interest.
The error, as reported by Cindy, is in the future projections. Not the current enrollment which can even be found on the MSDE site!
Furthermore according to Cindy’s story the current numbers are even on her story. They just got worked out by hand and not the complex program that had been used. What has not been found is the math error…..yet.
The APFO requires a three year projection of less than 110%,thus teh report is necessary.
The report numbers are not in the story. The only numbers are the numbers of what the new capacities are set at. Nowhere has it been reported that a manual report has been generated and verified.
Without the corrected report, the claim is just politics.
The report had those numbers it however required you to read all the pages and not just the top.
Thank you Cindy for staying on this problem!
It is all politics. However, with this announcement the flood gates have opened for new developments to begin, needed or not. Until the numbers are calculated, properly, this is just developers getting their way at the expense of the citizenry!
Once started, are developers really going to stop when the real numbers come out?
The only thing that is happening now is that the County is legally allowed to issue new construction permits. If the official numbers are above 110%, then the County is legally bound to put a freeze on the issuing of said permits. I don’t know any of the particulars are in terms of how long it takes to get a new construction permit, or how long a developer has to act on one once it is obtained, or what other restrictions the County has on issuing permits. I also assume that these enrollment numbers only affect residential construction, and not commercial construction.
To this day the so called “smart” people at the county and school board cannot figure out that when something is full or close to full, you stop adding to it. Those idiots would pump 10 gallons of gas into a 5 gallon container. Set the school max numbers to what you can handle when each class size is at the optimum. It’s basic math, then at most you will push the max at times, but be safe. But ,we all know what happens when the spineless developers buddies.. I mean elected officials.. hold their votes…..