Four Good Questions

I received an email yesterday with some important questions. Sharing seemed like a good idea.

1) Do we need to be competing with Fairfax for teachers? Quality of Life should count for something. Loudoun beats Fairfax in that department for families -- hands down.
LCPS caught up with Fairfax salaries over the past several years to make it easier to recruit and retain the best teachers. The fact is that we have a major challenge finding several hundred new teachers every summer, and most of them are coming right out of school and are looking partly for quality of life (and quality of career) but largely at the bottom line. Quality of life doesn't pay the rent or the college loans. Beyond that, you might consider that if you're 22 years old and single, quality of life looks different than when you're 40 and have a family. Loudoun is a great place to live, but the night life is lacking. And finally, we aren't just competing with Fairfax anymore, or even with the rest of the DC region. We have to recruit nationally to ensure there's a highly qualified professional in every classroom. Our teachers are the most important people in our community, and I would triple their salaries given the opportunity.

2) Are there areas of administration which can be streamlined and / or made more efficient? As organizations get larger, scale efficiencies dictate that administration should rise at a smaller rate than operations.
Realizing economy of scale is important and at LCPS, the number of administrators has steadily declined over the years in comparison to the number of students. While the student population has grown 141% in the past ten years, the number of administrators has grown only 90%. Of the ten DC-area public school districts, only the City of Manassas has a higher percentage of school-based personnel.

3) Do the long term enrollment projections support constructing buildings which will last 50-100 years? Is the ramp up merely a 5-10 year bump which will cause us to start closing schools or having significant over capacity 15 years from now? Trailers, while despised by most parents, are an economical alternative to new school construction and can stretch capacity at critical times.
The projections of both LCPS staff and the Washington COG project continued growth for at least the next 10 years. While it is difficult to do demographic projections past 10 years, the folks LCPS employs to make projections have an exceptionally good track record through the unprecedented growth of the past 20 years. It is difficult to imagine that Loudoun will grow so fast as to have 85,000 students ten years from now, but it was difficult to imagine LCPS with our current 54,000 ten years ago when we had just 20,000. It's also important to note that some of the schools still in use in Loudoun are nearly 100 years old. There is no reason to believe that any of the schools we build now will be at anything less than capacity for decades to come.

4) Is our commitment to keep up with the latest technology keeping us from adequate staffing? Computers are an aid to teaching, not a replacement for humans.
Strong teaching is always the foundation of great education, and LCPS will never lose sight of that. That said, our teachers cannot prepare our children for a technology-driven world with a chalkboard, and the School Board has made a strong commitment to technology that enhances instruction. While that investment is significant, the LCPS technology budget is a tiny fraction of our teacher salaries, and not holding us back from adequate staffing. What *would* hold us back from adequate staffing would be not trying to compete with Fairfax for teachers.