Just in case you were wondering what ever happened to all those vacancies at the Academic Magnet last year, they grew.
The latest statistics for the 2012-13 school year show that AMHS has 76 vacancies, up from the 70 that it had at the beginning of the prior year. Talk about a tin ear. No doubt the Charleston County School Superintendent will claim that no where in the county could students be found who wanted those seats and would be successful. Don't you believe it. That's a vacancy rate of 11 percent.
Think how valuable those empty seats are.
In addition, Garrett Tech's enrollment is also falling. For now only 676 students fill 896 potential seats; that's a 25 percent vacancy rate.
Not to be outdone, North Charleston High School, recently remodeled to hold 1000 students, now holds 467, a vacancy rate of 53 percent. In other words, the building is half empty.
While NCHS's poor reputation and availability of alternative schools can explain the vacancies there, what is to explain the drop in enrollment at Garrett, a school with a good reputation, and the vacancies at Academic Magnet, where we are told students are lining up to get in?
Sunday, September 16, 2012
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5 comments:
This is the reason. Bad management of the district, plain and simple, and a grossly uninformed board that doesn't know where to look or what to ask to improve its perspective of how the administration is performing.
When McGinley floated her idea of reducing NCHS to the status of a split high school with 9th and 10th graders only, the death knell was sounded. Only a matter of time now.
Even the vacancy numbers are elusive. This is when a specific enrollment figure becomes just another moving target. Conflicting numbers then are used by the administration as if to avoid having to give direct answers to potentially embarrassing questions.
For example, Burke High School was completed in 2005 and designed to accommodate a maximum of 1,800 students. The architect said then and CCSD still says the Burke High School "campus capacity" is 1,800 students.
But it's just like CCSD not to be nailed down to any single figure. The district CFO said last year the school’s size is really another number. Burke's "program capacity" is "only" 1,300. So when questions are raised about the extreme vacancy rate, they cover it up by introducing yet another number.
Now we hear there is a "budget capacity" of only 520 seats at Burke. It would appear district officials are trying to say that Burke, with a 7-day enrollment of only 467 students, only has 53 vacant seats. That's hard to believe. Yes, CCSD also owns a bridge in Brooklyn that they will sell you.
Back to the example at Burke. What goes with the other 780 empty "program capacity" seats, not to mention the 1,280 vacant "campus capacity" seats? The moment someone nails the district down on an inconsistency in the data they use, someone like Michael Bobby comes up with an answer like this.
There doesn't appear to be any integrity with the numbers issued by the district. If the school board's leadership is OK with this then we have an even bigger problem.
- Henry Copeland
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