Category: School Board (Page 3 of 9)

The Failure of Jason Glass at Jeffco Schools

September 27, 2020 / ijsadmin

When 2018-19 assessment results for Jeffco Schools became available last year there was a great deal of consternation. Achievement was down pretty much across the board and more importantly growth for the District was below the state average. A scramble was made to provide teachers with more planning time. Even though this was the second year of declining results under Glass, Deputy Superintendent Kris Schuh told the Board that this dip was anticipated due to moving to a focus on transforming the task and Deeper Learning.

While end-of-year state testing was not conducted in 2019-20 due to COVID, the District did, as it does every year, administer Winter MAP tests. Predictive MAP tests are highly correlated to state tests.

We can compare the yearly Winter MAP results to get an excellent idea of the direction the District’s students were headed in 2019-20 before Covid and whether the additional teacher planning time and the emphasis on transforming the task and Deeper Learning were having positive impacts.

Comparing the percentage of Jeffco students who Met or Exceeded Exceeded Standards from Winter 2018-19 to Winter 2019-20 we can see that the highly touted teacher planning time and continued emphasis on transforming the task were not working.

Essentially, Glass was failing in his most important responsibility – improving education in Jeffco.

And, unfortunately, this was the 3^rd straight year that Jeffco Winter MAP results went in a downward direction, for both Reading and Math under Glass.

Is it any wonder that Glass beat feet out of Jeffco? Winter 2019-20 results should have been available in January and he would have known these before applying to be Kentucky Ed Commissioner. It also makes me suspicious why, unlike every year in the past, Winter MAP results were not presented to the Board of Education in January or February. Was this an act of intentional deception that no one wanted to be accountable for?

It is clear from these charts that Jason Glass did a massive amount of damage to Jeffco’s kids. Even without the additional impacts from Covid, it will take years to stop this slide and get Jeffco headed in the right direction.

Complicit in this damage is Jeffco’s Board of Education. Current members Susan Harmon, Brad Rupert and Ron Mitchell were members of the Board when they hired Glass, without any record of improving education.

I hope these Board members realize how many kids’ they permanently harmed with the Glass hire and that they learned from this mistake when hiring the next Superintendent.

Jeffco is fortunate that Glass left when he did as there is no end in sight to Jeffco’s continuing downward spiral.

Glass was a complete failure in Jeffco.

The damage he did was real and will be extremely difficult to correct.

Glass needs to answer Remote Learning questions.

Remote Learning Questions for Jason Glass

July 18, 2020 / ijsadmin

With Denver Public Schools just announcing a start to the school year in full Remote Learning, we can believe that Glass will follow and announce the same within the next few days for Jeffco. This will be mere days after Glass’s disastorous FB Live event in which no actual questions regarding the District’s restart plan were answered.

In fact, in the 40 minutes of the FB Live event, Remote Learning and academics were not mentioned once. The restart plan itself merely contains several pages of vague eduspeak and is actually tellingly shorter than the Communications plan.

It’s just a plain dereliction of responsibility and an avoidance of accountability that the Plan is so vague and includes no specifics.

Remote Learning, in some form, was always going to happen this Fall. A failure to provide specifics in the Plan is a truly appalling lack of leadership.

Going forward, Glass should be required to immediately and definitively answer the following questions:

By what date will EVERY Jeffco student have at-residence access to their own electronic device? The only acceptable answer would be within the first week of class.
By what date will EVERY Jeffco student have at-residence internet connectivity. The only acceptable answer would be within the first week of class. Did the IT Department work on alternatives during the summer such as bus or school building roof hot spots as many other districts have done?
Will teachers be required to deliver Remote Learning from their classrooms for accountability purposes? If not, why not?
Given that school will start a week late, should we continue to expect 5 days of instruction weekly? If not, why not and what impact on students will reduced class time have on students?
When will beginning of year assessments be administered to ascertain how much learning was lost during the spring’s failed experiment in Remote Learning?
Will student attendance be measured in a different manner than in the spring? If not, why not?
How will teachers be held accountable for their instruction?
How, specifically, will best practices be shared? Will best practice sharing be limited to tool usage or will sharing/instruction on proven Remote Learning techniques be mandatory?
What guidelines will teachers be given relating to Remote Learning? Will there be Synchronous teaching requirements? If not, why not?
How will students be held accountable for Remote Learning?
What are the specific plans to make up for the spring learning loss?
Will anything be done to improve the Grab-and-Go meal distribution to ensure more students and families receive meals?
How long will non-working Classified staff be paid full wages if Remote Learning extends beyond just a few weeks?
If the school year starts with Remote Learning for all, why didn’t the District fall back on the K-5 in school option previously presented?

It’s well past time for the eduspeak and vague ‘plans’ for how things will work this fall. Remote Learning was always going to be given. At this point, Glass and staff should be able to provide details and extremely specific plans. If he can’t do that the Board should execute their responsibility of ensuring quality education and get rid of him immediately. They should put someone in charge who will actually get something done while there is still time to make an impact.

Unfortunately, we know that isn’t going to happen because the Board is extraordinarily weak and unwilling to ask the hard questions. In the end, thousands and thousands of students will be permanently harmed because of the incompetence of Jason Glass and the Board’s failures.

Jason Glass’s Act of Betrayal and Lack of Integrity

July 11, 2020 / ijsadmin

Glass can call it what he wants, an “opportunity to come home”, but mere days into the start of a 5 year contract extension, I call it something else – a complete lack of integrity and a total betrayal of Jeffco and the Board members who gave him that contract extension.

As much as I think that Glass is an extraordinarily weak leader, this move goes far beyond weak leadership – this move is downright disgusting.

Think about it. Glass left Jeffco at a crucial time in implementing his Covid Restart plan and at a time in the year when it is extremely difficult to ensure that high quality candidates to fill the position would be willing or even available for interviews.

What type of person, if they really cared about an organization, its employees and most importantly its students would just pick up and leave at this critical time after the Board had done everything within its power to provide continuity for the next 5 years?

Obviously, someone who is self-centered. Someone who doesn’t really care about the damage that their move might cause. Maybe someone who doesn’t think they can really succeed in the position. In any case, its someone I’m glad I’m not. I’ve been in positions before where I hadn’t finished projects I was leading, or hadn’t finished the transformation of an organization to my standards and turned down more lucrative and exciting opportunities. Not only did I want to get the sense of accomplishment for what I set out to do, but I felt an obligation to the organization and my people. I guess that’s the difference between Glass and me. I’m glad I don’t have the same set of values and integrity he has.

And, where does that leave Jeffco’s 84,000+ students and 5,000+ employees? Essentially leaderless for a year. Another year with no academic gains and then a transition year with a new Superintendent, who most likely isn’t going to buy into the Transform the Task, Deeper Learning mumbo-jumbo that so far has only brought about confusion and declining results in the District. So, another change in direction as 1,000s of kids continue to be harmed each year by the poor curriculum and teaching methods propagated by Glass.

The Board needs to get it right with the next choice for Superintendent. We need someone who has a track record of focusing on students, not teachers, and a record of improving education, backed by results. Glass was a great talker and blogger, but his 6 year record of failing to improve education results in both Eagle and Jeffco is a total disaster for the kids.

Jeffco's Budget Reduction Scenarios are not well thought out.

Jeffco’s Budget Reduction Proposals Don’t Make Sense

June 4, 2020 / ijsadmin

The Jeffco Board will be presented with additional information related to next year’s budget today at a Board meeting, here and here.

Much of what is included in the two documents makes it look like Jason Glass and the District staff really haven’t thought through what is going to happen to the District financially or how to make the necessary budget reductions.

To start, Federal money, both direct from Washington and allocated by Gov. Polis, appear to being used as compensation for a large budget shortfall in state funding. However, it is my understanding that the Federal money comes with some strings attached – primarily that it be used for explicit COVID-19 related expenditures, not merely as a backfill for items already budgeted or budget shortfalls. No where in the District staff discussion does it talk about these restrictions or how they will affect the use of the money. It merely appears that Jeffco is using the money as backfill. In addition, there is no discussion of ANY additional costs related to COVID, which the Federal money could be used for. Isn’t the District going to have fairly substantial COVID related costs? Why aren’t they reflected in the budget as increased expenditures?

The second major issue I have with the District’s budget discussion is that it is centered on next year. The state budget shortfall will last at least through the following year, probably longer, and the local property tax shortfall will begin next year as well. In this respect, CFO Askelson fails miserably in her job to present the Board with a complete financial picture. How can the Board decide how much to take from reserves this year if they have ZERO information on how bad the budgetary picture could look in the next few years? They can’t! In my mind, that is a demonstration of the total incompetence on the part of Glass and the CFO to not present that information.

Next, I find some of the District recommended cuts to be extremely questionable.

There are only 2 proposed cuts listed as ‘Damaging’. One of those is the District’s paid lobbyist. Damaging? To whom? I have a hard time even remotely thinking of that cut as Damaging. Listing it this way clearly explains everything that is wrong with Jason Glass and Jeffco schools. Glass likes to say: “keep the main thing the main thing’. I hardly think a paid lobbyist is the main thing.
The listing of the ‘Damaging’ lobbyist cut goes hand-in-hand with the ‘Recommended’ cut of 2 Literacy Interventionists. That’s doesn’t seem to be a great idea in a District where over 50% of kids don’t meet state reading expectations. Why not reduce the number of Community Superintendents by 2 for a $326k+ savings instead and even hire an additional Literacy Interventionist?
And, what about a cut of $2.2M in School Improvement Funds, money that principally goes to Title I schools? In the interest of equity, couldn’t Glass find something else to cut – like $4.2M in 1:1 device purchases that have not been proven to improve academic growth or achievement?

Where would I cut? You can see that in a letter I wrote to the Board here, but below are some suggestions of where the District can and should look to make cuts.

I don’t envy the Board in having to make the cuts. I particularly don’t envy the Board because Glass and District staff have done such a horrendous job in deriving a list of potential cuts. However, there seems to be a tremendous amount of bloat in Jeffco’s $1.2B budget that is not focused on improving education that can easily be cut without affecting education or kids.

When Innovation and Boldness Are Needed, Jeffco gets a Restart Plan Filled with Neither from Jason Glass

May 17, 2020 / ijsadmin

This past Wednesday Jason Glass and his staff presented their ‘DRAFT’ Fall Restart plan to the Jeffco Board of Education.

To put it mildly, the ‘Plan’ was, as expected, a disaster. In fact, it wasn’t a plan. It was more like a few general and high-level concepts. And, as previously pointed out, there was no discussion in the ‘Plan’ regarding the myriad education related issues.

There was no discussion of educational best practices, standards for teachers or standards for students. It didn’t discuss how the District will know if ALL teachers are doing their jobs and doing them effectively. It didn’t discuss how the District will identify, motivate and train poorly performing teachers, before kids are negatively impacted. It didn’t discuss how or when the District will know if students are learning at the same rate as they did in the pure classroom model. It didn’t discuss how low performance/growth will be corrected. It didn’t discuss the projected impacts on achievement. It didn’t discuss how the District will know if students are even attending class, particularly since the currently used ‘engagement’ standard is worthless.

It was only after Susan Miller asked several education related questions that we heard some of what Glass and the District were thinking. We heard that testing would be conducted early in the semester, we heard about the possible use of Flipped Classrooms, we heard that the District may consider teaching fewer subjects simultaneously but for longer times in a Block model and we heard that the District is considering identifying teachers who are good at Remote Learning for teaching students who will not physically come into the school.

All of that sounds good, from a high-level.

But Glass and Jeffco don’t have a lot of time. They need to use resources effectively. Glass always talks about innovation, it’s time he shows some of that innovation! Just as importantly, Glass and the District need to maximize their resources, including time.

Jeffco infamously prides itself on local control. However, in this pandemic period, it’s time for the District to consolidate resources and exercise central control over teachers and curriculum.

To put it mildly, the upcoming semester will be a nightmare for teachers. Teachers will either be teaching remotely or teaching using a hybrid model. Again, on the surface, that sounds good, but in practice how does that work out for students? What are students doing on the days they are remote but the teachers are devoting their attention to the students in the physical classroom? Personally, I don’t see that working well, unless everyone is willing to concede that the amount of material covered during the course of a semester will be significantly decreased. Another possibility would be team teaching. That could work out nicely for the A/B model, but in the A/B/C or A/B/C/D models the remote teacher would likely become the primary teacher.

The Flipped Classroom offers some possibilities, but when do teachers have time to create those needed videos while also doing the in-classroom teaching? Shoot the video during the in-classroom day is a possibility, but an awful amount of equipment will be needed District wide for this.

I just don’t see this working well and I suspect teachers will tell Glass and District staff this is going to be unworkable.

However, another possibility exists. Why can’t the District choose some of the best teachers and pay them, over the summer, to create the Flipped Classroom curriculum and record lessons? This is incredibly efficient and relieves a tremendous amount of stress on teachers. Instead of potentially 100s of teachers individually performing the exact same task, at varying degrees of competency, the District now has a uniform standard for what is taught. This material can now be delivered to every student on the same day so that students will be learning at the same pace. There’s a lot to like about this model.

To take this a step further, Kris Schuh has said that Jeffco has been meeting with other Front Range school Districts. Why not share some of the Flipped Classroom curriculum development with them? Again, this would maximize the use of resources and reduce individual Districts’ costs. There are some drawbacks to this approach, but it is something to consider.

In addition, there are consulting firms with experience in curriculum development. One example would be the curriculum developed for EngageNY.

In any case, time is of the essence. Chaos, low quality and low standards will ensue in the fall if the current incarnation of Remote Learning, morphed into Hybrid Learning, is allowed to continue.

Another area ripe for Innovation in the Hybrid Learning Model proposed by Glass is the sharing of teachers across schools. Right-sizing classroom sizes may be difficult due to some students preferring the Remote Learning model over the Hybrid model. This will most likely result in significant resource allocation issues for individual principals, especially at smaller schools. Why not share teachers? In essence a remote teacher could teach students from more than one school. To avoid total confusion schools could pair up with a single other school so there would be some consistency for the students in who they interact with. This could even be framed as an exchange program.

There has not been a more appropriate time for Innovation. Does Glass have what it takes to walk the walk? Or, let’s hope the teachers are more innovative than Glass has been with the worthless Restart Plan he presented to the Board on Wednesday.

Jeffco’s 2020-2021 Remote Learning Plan is Non-Existent

May 13, 2020 / ijsadmin

Today, Jeffco staff will present their 2020-2021 Restart Plan to the Board of Education.

It is an unmitigated disaster.

It looks like it was developed with about one hour’s worth of thought.

The ‘Plan’ only addresses student learning from an extremely high level, principally the reduction of class sizes by splitting classes into smaller cohorts who will attend in-person classes one day a week.

With only 1 remaining Board of Education meeting prior to school restarting in the fall, this broad outline does not provide nearly enough detail for the Board of Education to perform their primary function of governance.

The plan does not address how facilities will be sanitized. It does not address how buses will be sanitized. It does not address meals. It does not address school entrance procedures. It does not address what scenarios would require the closing of a school. It does not address costs. It does not address how schools would function and interactions kept to a minimum. It does not address the continuation of Grab and Go meals. There are so many things to consider. And, while I’m not suggesting that the District have answers to all of the questions right now, they should be talking with the Board about what the issues are, what they are considering, potential costs and when they will have those answers. No detail whatsoever.

But the most egregious part of the restart plan is the complete lack of any mention of education. Absolutely none!

Students will still be participating in Remote Learning for 80% of the time. I would think that very few people think that the same quality of instruction is happening now as happened when students were in physical classrooms. Yet, we now see that Remote Learning will be happening for an extended period of time. Therefore, Remote Learning MUST be just as good as in-classroom learning. But there is no discussion of best practices, standards for teachers or standards for students. How will the District know if ALL teachers are doing their jobs and doing them effectively? How will the District identify, motivate and train poorly performing teachers, before kids are negatively impacted? How/when will the District know if students are learning at the same rate as they did in the pure classroom model? How will low performance/growth be changed to correct this? What are the projected impacts on achievement? When will assessments be administered?

So many questions regarding the most important consideration of all and it is not even addressed.

Now is the time to put the necessary changes in motion, not in August.

Glass and his band of merry subordinates just don’t get it.

What a disaster.

The Road to Recovery or Deflection of Accountability?

May 12, 2020 / ijsadmin

Yesterday, the Superintendent of Jeffco Schools, Jason Glass, released a blog post titled: ‘Road to Recovery – How Lawmakers Can Ease the Crisis for Schools’.

As with most things related to Glass:

1. The post is political in nature. There is literally nothing in the post about educating Jeffco’s kids. Specifically, Glass does not talk about what Jeffco Schools are or will be doing to mitigate the effects of the, in most cases, lower quality of remote learning education.

2. Glass makes a big effort to shift responsibility and accountability to the state and away from himself and change the way in which he is measured and evaluated.

I particularly find his plea to ‘Stabilize enrollment counts and projections’ to be interesting, especially in light of the fact that Jeffco’s CFO was already publicly stating that the District was projecting a loss of 350 students and $3M in revenue.

Because of this, it is to Jeffco’s advantage to ‘hold-harmless’ school Districts for student losses as Jeffco’s losses are likely to be proportionally more than other Districts. What Glass doesn’t take into consideration is the possibility that one District could gain students from a neighboring District, but still have an overall loss. Will funding still be the same as last year? Here’s an example: In both Denver and Jeffco 10% of students who attended in 2019-2020 do not return to physical government schools in August for Covid-19 related reasons. Yet, an additional 100 students from Jeffco transfer into Denver schools. Is Glass saying that Jeffco should be held harmless and receive the same state money for those 100 students? And what about Denver, will they receive no money for those proportionally more students? Or, will the state, already in a budget crisis, be paying twice for some students?

Additionally, if the state does ‘hold-harmless’ student count, will Glass do the same with individual schools within Jeffco? Will principals receive the same SBB as last year if their enrollments decline? Will Glass be willing to pay twice for students who choice change schools?

Does Glass really think that there will be ANY Districts in Colorado that see an overall enrollment increase? How many District’s will permanently lose students to homeschooling when parents realize that their kids might get a better education at home than they have gotten in the government schools? It’s nice to say that Districts with growing enrollment will gain additional funding, but it’s not quite as simplistic, or equitable, as Glass makes it seem.

It is nice to see Glass admit that state funding for student losses is mitigated by the state funding formula.

School enrollment rises and falls each year across the state and money sent to districts adjusts accordingly (with provisions to soften the loss of funding for districts with declining enrollment).

His CFO, Kathleen Askelson doesn’t seem to get that concept as she has repeatedly told the Board of Education that a loss of 350 students will result in a $3M loss ($8,571/per student) of revenue to the District (there are other problems with her loss claim too, as outlined here). Shouldn’t the BoE be able to trust the District’s CFO? Does Jeffco need a new one? That’s a big swing of money, when Districts are checking sofa cushions, to make misrepresentations like that.

Testing – to put it bluntly – Glass doesn’t like it. He has stated it several times in the past. And, there’s no reason why he should. Since he has been Superintendent in Jeffco schools’ academic growth and achievement scores are down. He just doesn’t want to be measured and made accountable for the pathetic Jeffco Generations Academic Performance Indicator goals he is nowhere close to achieving.

What better opportunity than a pandemic crisis to change the conversation and implement measurement systems that aren’t comparative and have the distinct possibility of not measuring anything:

While … the challenges presented by COVID-19 are disruptive, they also present opportunities for meaningful change and innovation. On assessments and accountability, the legislature should direct school districts to develop locally-designed accountability systems …

When you’re failing at your primary job of educating kids, why not just change the measurement system so that people can’t really see how badly you’re doing.

I’m sorry, but I’m not buying that and neither should Polis, the legislature or parents. We can’t let the fox guard the hen house.

There’s no doubt that Covid-19 is going to have a big impact on K-12 education for an extended period of time and Glass has made some valid points. It will not be an easy time. Systems, processes and people will need to change and adapt. Leaders will need to emerge. However, I would have preferred that Glass talk about how he intends to stop and reverse the Covid-19 slide with curriculum, standardized/best practice teaching methodologies and evaluation of teachers’ instruction practices than just one more politically slanted, shifting responsibility and avoiding accountability blog post.

Glass and Jeffco Board are Failing in their Fiduciary Responsibilities to Taxpayers

May 9, 2020 / ijsadmin

5B Bond projects to date are grossly over budget.

This past Thursday, May 7, 2020, Tim Reed, Executive Director Facilities and Construction at Jeffco Schools, told the Board of Education that as of April 30, 2020 $57M in contingency remained for the District’s 6-year Capital Improvement Program (CIP).

Given that the Contingency presented to taxpayers prior to the 2018 5B vote was $86M, $57M sounds like a reasonable amount to be remaining.

However, it was only after Director Susan Miller asked a question did Tim tell the Board that the $57M included additional Construction Contingency of $11.5M that the Board would later vote on that evening for overages in the Alameda project. This would effectively reduce the amount of remaining contingency to $46M. In addition, it seems that the additional Construction also comes with even more Soft Costs (thanks to another question by Director Miller), usually in the range of 20%. This would necessitate the use of ANOTHER $2.25M in Contingency, further reducing the available amount to under $44M.

While this is troubling, a mere 18 months into a 6 year program, there was even more troubling news in Tim’s slide. That news was that Tim and Jeffco have added the $50M in bond premium and $11M in bond interest to the Program’s Contingency, raising total Program Contingency to a whopping $147M.

It is shocking to me that Jeffco has seemingly burnt through over $100M in Contingency in only 18 months, when the total Program Contingency was presented to taxpayers as $86M.

And only Susan Miller is concerned and asks questions about this.

Brad Rupert asked Tim Reed if he agreed with the statement that it appeared that over half of the Contingency remained and Tim agreed. That statement is ONLY true if you base it on the original $86M.

Ron Mitchell flat out stated that he trusts Tim Reed, obviously too old and tired to, or maybe incapable of, performing the math to show that $100M in Contingency has already been spent.

And through all of this Jason Glass just sat silently. His non-existent leadership on full display.

Who is going to provide oversight to this spending and overages? A contingency budget is money set aside to cover unexpected costs during the construction process. Who is going to ask why nearly every project has unexpected costs and why those unexpected costs are so high? Who is going to ask why there should be an expectation that this trend will change with future projects? Who is going to ask why there should be an expectation that there will be enough money to deliver on ALL of the promises made to individual schools and taxpayers?

Who is going to take their fiduciary responsibility seriously? Glass? Don’t count on it. The Board of Education? Susan Miller is asking the right questions. Brad Rupert is asking questions, but they leave too much wiggle room for Tim Reed. Susan Harmon and Brad Rupert are just District fan boys who never question anything the District does or says, so don’t count on them.

The District and taxpayers have already suffered from this fiscal mismanagement (What to do with $50M in bond premium). It’s time to put an end to the reckless and harmful spending propagated by Glass and Reed to ensure that ALL projects can be completed on time with the initially planned scope and the money taxpayers provided.

What to do with Jeffco’s $50M 5B Bond Windfall?

March 20, 2020 / ijsadmin

When Jeffco went to the financial market to sell bonds for its Capital Improvement Program, interest rates were low. Due to the way the bond was structured, this allowed Jeffco to obtain $50M in unexpected funding, or bond premium, for essentially the same costs.

But what to do with that extra $50M?

In its 5B bond campaign Jeffco leadership stated (falsely) that the District had $1.3 billion in deferred maintenance needs. So why not use that $50M to address some of those needs that the $546M of 5B money couldn’t?
Replace several of the schools that were slated for replacement in the 2016 failed Bond proposal such as Kyffin, Green Gables, Fletcher Miller or Parr.
Ensure there is equity. Once 5B projects are completed there will still be several schools that have obvious FCI values much higher than other schools. For example, Vivian will have a FCI of over 44% while Stober, Colorow, Muhlholm and Lumberg will all have FCIs above 22%, well above the average FCI for District schools. Why not use some of the bond premium to actually provide the equity that Jeffco is always so quick to talk about?
Reduce the amount of Capital Transfer from the General Fund that will be needed each year. The Capital Improvement Program is predicated on receiving $23M per year from the General Fund. It looks like there is already a shortfall this year of $2.1M. So, as a minimum, use the $50M bond premium to reduce the pressure on the General Fund. Spread out over the remaining 5 years of the Capital Improvement Project that would mean a reduction of $10M from the General Fund each year.

This $50M is an OPPORTUNITY to use taxpayers’ money to over deliver and make some additional enhancements to Jeffco.

To do anything less will be fiscal mismanagement, demonstrating that Jeffco is not capable of adequately managing the money taxpayers trusted it with. It will also make it more difficult to get Bonds passed in the future.

Do not use this $50M as added contingency for a program that already has $86M or 15% contingency built into it!

Board Governance, Fiduciary Responsibility, Transparency and 5B Accountability

March 2, 2020 / ijsadmin

At the end of January, Tim Reed gave a rosy assessment during his Capital Improvement Program overview.

Unfortunately, things may not be as rosy as he wants everyone to believe.

Tim Reed did not tell the Board of Education, that based on the District’s project estimates presented to voters in 2018 that there are currently at least 5 schools over budget. And, this is just using costs from Board approved contracts.

These overages will be much higher when prorating District wide contracts for IT and Security, allocating Track upgrade costs and any contracts under $500,000 that are not readily publicly available. In addition, it is highly unlikely that these will be the last costs at these schools.

A mere sixteen months after 5B approval, this is not a good track record.

These 5 schools include:

Three Creeks
- Flipbook Estimate – $4,697,000
- Contracts Awarded – $5,044,317 + Track(from $19.5M contract), IT and Security Upgrades
Wilmott
- Flipbook Estimate – $3,894,141
- Contracts Awarded – $6,694,585 + IT and Security Upgrades
Columbine HS
- Flipbook Estimate – $14,129,966
- Contracts Awarded – $15,548,043 + Track(from $18M contract), IT and Security Upgrades
Arvada HS
- Flipbook Estimate – $14,765,828
- Contracts Awarded – $15,548,043 + Track(from $19.5M contract), IT and Security Upgrades
Conifer HS
- Flipbook Estimate – $9,820,651
- Contracts Awarded – $9,782,705 + Track(from $19.5M contract), IT and Security Upgrades

With $86M in Contingency, $50M in Bond Premium and a few $M saved from cheating Charter schools from their fair share, some overage MAY be alright. But, does the Board KNOW that it is alright? Will there be enough money left to deliver on the promises to the schools which will not be getting work done until the end based on this current rate of overages and use of contingency funds?

And what about the now known extras that were not identified in the Flipbook? Extras such as $7M for the North Transportation Hub, or $4.225M for Trailblazer Stadium or even $750,000 for Project Management (that’s over $11M so far). What else is out there? That eats into the Contingency and Premium pretty quickly.

Doesn’t the Board have a Governance and Fiduciary Responsibility to ensure that everything that was promised to taxpayers is delivered?

I would think that the Board can’t deliver on that promise unless it begins looking at contracts as part of the big picture, starting at how they fit within the Flipbook budget of each school. Then the Board needs to understand how each school fits within the Bond’s total budget. Continuing to approve contracts piecemeal, one at a time, does not give anyone an idea of how spending fits within the overall Bond budget. This is how surprises happen and money runs out.

All decent Project Managers track projects’ budgets. In this case, it could be as simple as tracking the following and have staff report on this to the Board with every contract approval request:

Original Flipbook Estimate
Contracts Awarded to Date
Estimate of Remaining Work
Total Variance from Original Estimate

It would seem that some of the Board’s primary functions are Governance and Fiduciary Responsibility. Without looking at each contract as part of the overall budget, the Board is failing, especially since so many school projects are already over budget.

In addition, the Board has repeatedly stated their goal of public transparency. By allowing staff to continue to merely give rosy 5B assessments without including project budget tracking numbers will mean that the Board is failing in that aspect too,

It’s time for the Board to exercise their Governance and Fiduciary Responsibilities and require District staff to fully disclose budget numbers in a manner that provides accountability to the very specific and detailed public promises made in the District’s 5B Flipbook.