Minutes 02-25-2020 Schools - Laserfiche WebLink

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20 Commissioner Marcoplos said he thinks it would be important to count accurately. OCS Chair Atherton said 10% would be a maximum amount of growth, and accurate numbers would be counted of those students physically sitting in the schools. He said the 10% number would be a way to have an agreement on how much growth can occur. He said numbers would not go above 10%. Matthew Roberts said OCS currently has a pre-K waiting list of 78, and the 10% number would allow those children to be served, as well as room for growth. Chair Rich said she wonders if counting pre-K students will result in the faster building of new schools, and it takes a school from being 10 years out to three years out. She said the BOCC is not against counting pre-K, but rather is concerned about the acceleration of the need for capacity. OCS Chair Atherton said SAPFO is a planning tool, and its only teeth are not that the County must build schools, but rather it says the CAPS will stop. He said his concern is that the students are there now, and either new school will be needed, or the capacity will have to be extended to accommodate. He said SAPFO does not require the BOCC to build schools, but it is important to look at the reality of what is happening right now. Chair Rich said the BOCC has been discussing universal pre-K for three years, but the reality is that it does push up the need for new school buildings and the BOCC must be mindful of taxing the residents. Bonnie Hammersley said SAPFO is a planning tool for the County, and she is confident that if SAPFO showed the need for a school, the County would build it. She said if one throws the 10% into SAPFO, a new school will be needed next year. She said the reason SAPFO did not include pre-K is because the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) does not count pre-K. She said Orange County is the only county in the state that uses SAPFO, and most other counties do not have a planning tool. She said school staff has presented $500 million worth of needs in the current school buildings, and counting pre-K would add a new school to that list as well. OCS Chair Atherton said he is not advocating adding 10% into SAPFO right now, and his concerns are based on the actual numbers of pre-K students currently. He said if these students are counted, then there is a need for 2 '/2 schools needed within four years, and not counting these students does not change the reality that they exist and are sitting in seats. He said putting blinders on will force the schools do to a social injustice to the kids with the most needs, and the schools will no longer be able to serve the children that are already being served. Joal Broun said if there is a desire to get to universal pre-K, then planning has to begin now. She said the goal of universal pre-K cannot be achieved without a plan to pay for it, which includes the students that are already in the schools. She said it would be ignoring reality to not count the current pre-K students. She said pre-K is an investment in children and leads to greater success as an adult. She said investing early will lead to less social and economic costs later. CHCCS Chair Wolf said the 10% idea came up in order to respect the process, but now she is hearing it may be better to just include the current pre-K kids in the SAPFO counts. Steve Halkiotis said there were 5 Board of County Commissioners who voted on the original SAPFO agreement, and he was one of them. He said the goal of SAPFO was not to determine when a school was needed, but rather it was a hidden plan to control growth and it has backfired. He said OCS is now seeing the growth that CHCCS has already seen. He said pre-K was not a topic of discussion when SAPFO was created. Steve Halkiotis said social justice should begin at birth, and a child grows and develops more between birth and age 3, than in the rest of its life. He said social justice is directly linked