West Covina’s top performing school’s charter was renewed last week. While the vote was 5-0, the vote doesn’t end the problem with the numbers the district is using. At the beginning the District claimed the the Edison School was costing the district over a million dollars. They and a few board members claimed that this money was coming at the expense of our other students.
From the beginning, I never believed the numbers. The district got there numbers by dividing the total number of kids by all the money and coming up with a number.
The district could never come up with what the actual costs were. This always puzzled me. If something was costing us over a million dollars, why couldn’t we come up with the proof?
Still the three board opponents of Edison held fast to the district’s logic. The way I explain the district’s formula is like this. Four people go out to dinner and three of them share a bottle of wine and have a night cap. The one friend doesn’t. At the end they get the bills and say “let’s just divide the total by 4″. That isn’t the fair way to determine a food bill, but is especially not the fair way to figure out school busgets.
The final proof that the figures didn’t add up are in the final contract itself. Edison is going to pay over 500,000 dollars but well short of a million. Yet, the contract says it is “cost neutral”. Huh?
The answer came from the business office that the contractis cost neutral depending on how you allocate the money.
That was the whole point. The original allocation was being used for political purposes rather than being a true indication of what it the school costs. Funny allocations have no place in WCUSD.
