Fairfax School Board's Gateway drug
By: Barbara Hollingsworth
Local Opinion Editor
January 19, 2009
Like school systems everywhere, Fairfax County Public Schools must tighten its $2.2 billion budget for the 2009-10 school year. Superintendent Jack Dale has already told teachers not to expect any pay hikes or cost-of-living increases and theatens to cut more than 1,000 jobs.
The girls gymanstics program has been axed and parents are being warned that class sizes will increase next year due to a $170 million budget shortfall that could balloon to $215 million, Dale warns, if the equally cash-strapped Board of Supervisors doesn't give him the 3.5 percent increase he asking for. If FCPS doesn' get the money, more student programs - including indoor track and field, fine arts classes and summer school - will vanish as well.
Yet just three months ago - at the very height of the Wall Street meltdown -the Fairfax School Board voted to spend $130 million (not including $5 million in annual debt service) to buy Gatehouse II,
an office building in Merrifield currently occupied by the Red Cross, to match one it already owns there while thousands of school
children are still being taught in 900 supposedly temporary trailers, some of which are literally falling apart.
The purchase agreement for Gatehouse II - dubbed "the marble palace" by disgusted parents - included $52 million for the 35-year-old building itself, which cost the current owner $44 million two years ago at the height of the real estate bubble. But the whizzes at FCPS are willing to pay $8 million more in a sinking market like a drug addict who doesn't care what the next fix will cost.
Of course, it's not their money - it's yours.
They also agreed to pay an extra $5 million for improvements that have already been made to the property. That's like giving a home seller extra cash at the settlement table for kitchen remodeling they did five years ago! Who does that?
Another $73 million would be spent on extensive renovations that include a health spa and an indoor/outdoor cafeteria for Dale and his staff. The roomy new building would provide more square footage per employee than the federal government, which leases most of its new office space. Nothing but the best for our hard-working school officials.
Dale wants to consolidate 1,750 FCPS employees from 14 sites, including the Devonshire Center in the eastern part of the county. As members of Fairfax CAPS - a citizen group opposed to the purchase - point out, there are several problems with this idea,
one of them being that 92 percent of the affected staff is school-based. That means a substantial increase in travel costs.
How much? Nobody knows - including FCPS. "An analysis of local travel would be very complex and time consuming," Paul Regnier, coordinator of the school system's Office of Community Relations wrote to a citizen requesting this information under the Freedom of Information Act.
"The travel cost savings calculation methodology used in the original business model was developed by staff no longer employed by FCPS," media specialist Mary Shaw wrote on Aug. 27, 2008. "We were unable to locate the work papers that were used for these calculations." This is the administrative equivalent of "the dog ate my homework."
Budget documents show over $1 million in travel expenses for Gatehouse I employees, so the figure for Gatehouse II would probably be in the vicinity. Yet school officials claim buying the Merrifield building "won't cost us a thing."
Regnier also said FCPS didn't even have a copy - "electronically or in any other format" - of the build vs. buy presentation used by the
School Board to make its decision. Ditto for cost/benefit and
investment review analyses. "Staff is aware of only one document that was prepared by the School Board staff," wrote senior assistant county attorney Michael Long in response to a citizen FOIA request;
that one lone document was distributed to supervisors in a Sept. 22, 2008 closed session and therefore "not subject to mandatory provisions of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act," Long explained.
Translation: We're not telling you squat about how we propose to spend $130 million of your money.
The purchase proposal was voted down by the BOS, but Dale and his minions have not given up even though the purchase of Gateway II would add millions to FCPS' annual operating expenditures when the school system is supposed to be trimming costs, not adding them.
The new budget also doesn't include $18 million that would be needed to renovate the Devonshire Center on Graham Road for students now attending the Blue-Ribbon Graham Road Elementary, which was itself recently renovated, or bus expenses for the school's
predominantly low-income students who are now just a five-minute walk away.
"Devonshire is not good enough for administrators, but it's
good enough to put kids in," one disgusted parent told me.
The kicker is that moving the Graham Road students to the Devonshire building would also place them outside of existing school boundaries.
"My 10-year-old granddaughter goes to school in a trailer with no water, no restrooms, mold and rust. She has to walk outside with another 10-year-old for security whenever she needs to use the
bathroom, yet Dale is going to buy himself a Taj Mahal with a health spa so he can get a tan? Let him have the trailers and make him go outside whenever he needs to go to the bathroom," another angry Fairfax County taxpayer told me.
Sounds like an excellent idea.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner's local opinion editor. She can be reached by email at: bhollingsworth@dcexaminer.com
