Stamford Friends – With regards to the Stamford School
Facilities here are few facts that must be acknowledged:
- Stamford (and its school population) is growing faster than
any projections have indicated. Stamford is now the state’s economic engine and
will continue to be so for the coming decades. Stamford needs first-class
facilities to continue to attract the best and brightest to our schools and
prevent them from fleeing to surrounding communities.
- While our academic success continues to soar, our facilities
have fallen woefully behind. The city
has under invested in the maintenance of our buildings for years, resulting in many
deficient buildings that require hundreds of millions of dollars to renovate
and repair. Keep in mind our
bureaucratic system, which would exponentially increase the cost and timing of
doing any project at the scale that is necessary.
- Our current system of maintaining our schools is
fundamentally broken and is not receiving the attention and necessary
investments from the city’s elected boards. This is not the fault of any one person
or group, but rather a result of the short-term perspective that has been taken
by all of our elected officials over the past decade plus. There are
plenty of dedicated individuals who have spent their careers working to maintain
the schools but have been prevented from implemented the necessary upgrades.
Mike Handler, the city’s CFO, and Dr. Tamu Lucero, Stamford
School Superintendent, who have been tasked with managing these facilities over
the past 14 months, have developed a bold plan that has acknowledged that the
existing model of maintaining our schools is fundamentally broken. This
is a great step, as it is the first time any city official has openly discussed
this topic and forced a conversation around the potential ongoing costs of
utilizing this broken model. They are proposing a new direction that will
result in the city having new, state-of-the-art school facilities
There are a myriad of reasons why the traditional model is broken,
and fixing the city’s processes to increase efficiencies would not solve the
underlying problem that many of our schools are past their useful life. Continuing
to do nothing would force us to continue to invest (or worse, under invest) in
schools that need significant upgrades that would most certainly lead to
pumping more money into renovation and less into the actual education.
This plan does involve contracting the entire facilities process
to a private third party, who would be fully responsible for building, managing,
and maintaining five new schools (Westhill, Cloonan, Roxbury, Hart,
Toquam). The third party would be paid a
fixed price that does incorporate a profit set over a TBD (45 years/90 years?) fixed
period of time. At the end of the term,
the land and buildings would revert back to the city.
The idea behind this plan is to select a single vendor that
would be wholly responsible for managing the facilities’ function of these new
buildings. Where this causes the city to
assume some risk with a single point of failure, the contract would need to be
written and managed as an amicable marriage, where both parties are benefiting over the longer term. The choice of
starting this plan with five schools provides a greater incentive for the third
party, knowing this is a long-term contract and the project is to scale
efficiencies across multiple facilities.
An alternative approach would be to contract with multiple
vendors that would each be responsible for an individual building. Where this does spread some risk around, we
also assume greater financial risk by not leveraging scale across multiple
sites and forcing the vendors to hire individually rather than
holistically. This second option also
becomes a bit of a management challenge of trying to manage multiple vendors
across multiple sites, which would add additional layers of unexpected costs
that don’t add any real value to the Board of Education and only diverts
resources out of the classroom
This plan could start with less schools in transition, but the
goal is to sufficiently incentivize the third party knowing that they will be
getting a larger portion of work up front rather than bid out each building
development individually.
The contract will include incentives to keep the third party
sufficiently engaged to honor their end of the arrangement. The theory is this allows Stamford to get new
facilities and take the time and expenses of managing the facilities off of the
board of education’s plate and operating budget, allowing them to focus on what is really important—the
education (and safety) of our children.
Now this plan is not perfect.
It is very aggressive and the reality is all work on the initial
proposal will most likely not be completed within the estimated timeframe, but
we have to start somewhere. If we don’t
start making decisions and taking action now, then we will just be pouring more
money down the drain while we hem and haw and allow for analysis paralysis
malaise to set over the city, kicking the can for the next set of elected
officials to come up with a plan. It is
time to do something to help our city, our schools, and our children. We need every parent to understand this plan
and why it is ultimately good for the city, then meet with their local board of
reps, call the members of the board of finance, and tell them why we need to
enact this plan now.
Yes, there are going to be a lot of moving pieces (and students)
that will likely cause some parents distress.
However, this is an investment we need to make and we need to make it
now. We cannot continue to underinvest
and put Band-Aids on our buildings. We
need to ask ourselves, “What type of city do we want to leave for our children
and grandchildren?”
From Noah Lapine Last year, the National Bureau of Economic
Research published a report titled, “Using Market Valuation to Assess Public
School Spending.” It found that “for every dollar spent on public schools in a
community, home values increased $20.” A 20-to-1 return on investment for all
homeowners in this city dramatically outpaces all proposed property tax
increases to fund the plan.
In a city where only 23% of registered voters turn out for local
elections—and of those who do vote, two-thirds are over age 50—this plan will
need a broader level of community engagement to get approval. We need the
younger voters of our city to advocate for this plan. The under 50 parents and parents-to-be
who want to make Stamford the city where they raise their children need to be heard.
Voices of dissent are always more motivated to advocate against a cause than
those in favor. It can’t be the case with this important proposal. I am urging
the citizens of this city, young and old, lifelong residents and new, to get
up, get out, and get loud in support of our schools, our children, and our
future.
