School building reimbursement figures increase
Rebecca Leonard
TEMPLETON An update to the Massachusetts School Building Authority’s reimbursement guidelines might give the town more money back for the new elementary school project.
“I’ve got some good news for you!” interim Superintendent Dr. Stephen Hemman told School Committee members on Wednesday, saying that the state has increased the amount it will reimburse towns for school projects.
In the past, the state reimbursed towns for eligible costs at the rate of $287 per square foot. Now, the MSBA has raised its eligible cost reimbursement to $299 per square foot.
But what does this mean when looking at the numbers?
“If you’re over the $299, say by $150, MSBA will pay up to the $299. They won’t reimburse you the full amount. Increasing their reimbursement lets us pay less for the new school,” explained Mr. Hemman.
The exact total cost for the school is $47,563,184 and the current amount of reimbursement from the MSBA to the town is $21,912,242. The town would be paying back a projected total of $25,650,942 over a 28-year time period.
The new reimbursement price could potentially be 22,708,075, making the amount residents needs to pay back $24,855,109, an additional savings of almost $800,000. The tax impact on residents would be slightly lower as well.
According to Mr. Hemman, the recent change to reimbursement of eligible costs is due to changes in construction costs across the state. The MSBA “has to be fair to every school throughout the state” and has to treat every one of them the same way.
Different areas have different construction costs, but the $299 will remain the same.
This project would create a new, three-story, 93,000-square-foot school that would serve 580 students, replacing both Templeton Center School and Baldwinville Elementary School, at the site of Templeton Center School. A public forum will be held at Narragansett Middle School on Oct. 7 at 6:30 p.m. to explain the proposal.
Mr. Hemman received the news from Jon Winikur the owner’s project manager on Tuesday and he presented it to the School Committee at Wednesday night’s meeting. [Is this a DistrictProject?]
According to Mr. Winikur, they still need to go through the MSBA review process before any of the amounts are finalized.
“I’m ecstatic that we have more money coming back to us and that it’ll be less on the taxpayers,” expressed Mr. Hemman.
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Is the new elementary school a District project or a Town of Templeton project?
Were the town administrator and the selectmen notified of this turn of events before the school committee?
So now there are EXACT costs for the project? Really?
Where is the full accounting of the $1,050,000 for the feasibility study and project design?
Where is the full accounting of the MSBA reimbursements for allowable costs for the feasibility and project design?
Anyone remember the funding for the Senior Center and the playground? Remember how that funding was at the mercy of 9C cuts? Remember how the town had the money, and then it didn't and then it did and then it didn't and then it did?Anyone else remember that? Is the funding for an additional $12 per square foot in jeopardy when there is an economic downturn? Or will it be in jeopardy when the state doesn't meet its revenue projections?
The town is beginning to recover financially. It seems counter intuitive to ask voters to approve 50 million dollars in borrowing while at the same time trying to restore the town's credit rating.
What are we purchasing?
ReplyDelete194. A Critical Appraisal: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
A Critical Appraisal
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the new school institution slowly took root
after the Civil War in big cities and the defeated South, some of the best minds in the
land, people fit by their social rank to comment publicly, spoke out as they watched its
first phalanx of graduates take their place in the traditional American world. All these
speakers had been trained themselves in the older, a-systematic, noninstitutional schools.
At the beginning of another new century, it is eerie to hear what these great-grandfathers
of ours had to say about the mass schooling phenomenon as they approached their own
fateful new century.
In 1867, world-famous American physician and academic Vincent Youmans lectured the
London College of Preceptors about the school institution just coming into being:
School produces mental perversion and absolute stupidity. It produces bodily disease. It
produces these things by measures which operate to the prejudice of the growing brain. It
is not to be doubted that dullness, indocility, and viciousness are frequently aggravated
by the lessons of school.
Thirteen years later, Francis Parkman (of Oregon Trail fame) delivered a similar
judgment. The year was 1880, at the very moment Wundt was founding his laboratory of
scientific psychology in Germany:
Many had hoped that by giving a partial teaching to great numbers of persons, a thirst for
knowledge might be awakened. Thus far, the results have not equaled expectations.
Schools have not borne any fruit on which we have cause to congratulate ourselves,
(emphasis added)
In 1885, the president of Columbia University said:
The results actually attained under our present system of instruction are neither very
flattering nor very encouraging.
In 1895, the president of Harvard said:
ReplyDeleteOrdinary schooling produces dullness. A young man whose intellectual powers are worth
cultivating cannot be willing to cultivate them by pursuing phantoms as the schools now
insist upon.
When he said this, compulsion schooling in its first manifestation was approaching its
forty- fifth year of operations in Massachusetts, and running at high efficiency in the city
of Cambridge, home to Harvard.
Then, in the early years of the twentieth century, pedagogy underwent another
metamorphosis that resulted in an even more efficient scientific form of schooling. Four
years before WWI broke out, a well-known European thinker and schoolman, Paul
Geheeb, whom Einstein, Hermann Hesse, and Albert Schweitzer all were to claim as a
friend, made this commentary on English and German types of forced schooling:
The dissatisfaction with public schools is widely felt. Countless attempts to reform them
have failed. People complain about the "overburdening" of schools; educators argue
about which parts of curriculum should be cut; but school cannot be reformed with a pair
of scissors. The solution is not to be found in educational institutions, (emphasis added)
In 1930, the yearly Inglis Lecturer at Harvard made the same case:
We have absolutely nothing to show for our colossal investment in common schooling
after 80 years of trying.
Thirty years passed before John Gardner's "Annual Report to the Carnegie Corporation,"
in 1960, added this:
Too many young people gain nothing [from school] except the conviction they are
misfits.
The record after 1960 is no different. It is hardly unfair to say that the stupidity of 1867,
the fruitlessness of 1880, the dullness of 1895, the cannot be reformed of 1910, the
absolutely nothing of 1930, and the nothing of 1960 have continued into the schools of
today. We pay four times more in real dollars than we did in 1930 and thus we buy even
more of what mass schooling dollars always bought.
The Systems Idea In Action
The money is in millions, got that. Really, a town on the edge of bankruptcy a couple of years ago, now to borrow the not so small sum of 50 million while Phillipston sits back with money in the bank. How much you want to bet the kids from Phillipston come to Templeton Center while the residents from our town struggle to make ends meet while Phillipston keeps their money in the bank. What makes them so smart and us so dumb. That does come to mind just how are the roads getting fixed. Maybe I should call our newest Selectman and ask her to get to work on that. Seems she had no problem getting hers done. Just go to the Selectman's meeting and shoot your mouth off, after all it worked for her. Has she opened her mouth yet, to offer up any gems. Oh yes, she was going to sit and learn, the first year. Scrappy #2, another fine Selectman from Light and Water. As Bart always said, "Templeton Voters get the government they deserve along with the tax rate to prove it." The new school will not make the kids any smarter. It will only stress the parents out even more. That will be good for the package stores. Stressed people drink more. I guess maybe I should not have sat at this computer, this morning. Maybe I am sick of riding over bad roads, and having the Town government run by people with bad agendas. Bev.
ReplyDelete