This series explores the impact of state and federal mandates on the Lansing Central School District.  Part 1 explores what a mandate costs.  Part 2 will look at mandate outcomes, and Part 3 will explore the value of mandates vs. local programs.

We all know about unfunded mandates.  School districts regularly struggle with mandates that may or may not contribute to effective educating.  But school officials are hard-pressed to put dollar values on them.  Part of the reason is that mandate expenditures may be interwoven with things the district would have been doing anyway, or mandates may be partly or wholly funded or recompensed with state or federal aid.  Lansing school officials say that mandates punish successful school systems even as they may bring up poorer performing districts.

"They're saying we don't trust a community to be really good about providing a good quality education, so we're going to tell you how to provide this," says Lansing School Business Administrator Mary June King.

King estimates that of the district's $25 million budget, approximately $20 million goes to the mandates.  She says the level of mandates state and federal law imposes has stripped too much local control from communities and their boards of education.

The chatter in Albany confuses the issue.  Recently legislators have made much of mandate reform.  The idea is that the 2% property tax levy cap prevents localities from raising enough money to pay for mandates.  But Lansing Superintendent Stephen Grimm says that while the legislation removes mandates that have been on the books for years, new and expensive mandates are also being imposed.

The newest mandate for school districts is APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review), a uniform system of evaluating teachers and principals.  Theoretically it imposes a subjective rating system that assigns a grade to each teacher based, in part, on student performance and attendance.

On February 16th Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the new program, attaching it to $700 million to be distributed to successful conforming school districts through the Race to the Top program.  4% of state aid will be linked to districts that approve local APPR agreements.

"Today's agreement puts in place a groundbreaking new statewide teacher evaluation system that will put students first and make New York a national leader in holding teachers accountable for student achievement," Cuomo said. "This agreement is exactly what is needed to transform our state's public education system, and I am pleased that by working together and putting the needs of students ahead of politics we were able to reach this agreement."

Lansing Superintendent Stephen Grimm says that evaluating teachers is important, but the new mandate punishes taxpayers in school districts like Lansing that are already performing well.

"I just got back from the New York State Council Of School Superintendents (NYSCOSS) in Albany," he says.  "The 'Superintendent of the Year', Hank Grishman of Jericho, said 'if we've got school systems that are doing well, why is the State imposing an onerous evaluation system on everyone?'  Why can't it just be for the ones that are struggling?"

The existing evaluation method in Lansing is less time and resource-consuming than the Governor's new program. 

"Evaluating teachers is very important," says Lansing School Superintendent Stephen Grimm.  "A teacher is the most important single factor in the success of learning in the classroom.  So it's important that we have good teachers in front of our kids."

But Grimm adds that the new rules put a burden on local taxpayers in an already successful school district that has an acceptable evaluation system already in place.  He says that while the State is trumpeting mandate reform in which outdated mandates are being taken off the books, they are adding expensive new ones.

What Cost to the District?

So what does an unfunded mandate cost?  Despite the talk in Albany about mandate relief, the new APPR mandate brings a high cost to school districts.  Lansing is a high-performing school system with an evaluation procedure already in place.  The new system is more time-consuming for administrators, teachers, and support staff.

Grimm, Principals Chris Pettograsso, Jamie Thomas, and Eric Hartz, and Director of Special Services Kathy Roarke each need ten hours of off campus training to be evaluators.  Each teacher evaluation involves two classroom observations (one scheduled, the other unannounced) that come to 40 minutes each, a pre-observation conference and a post-observation conference, plus about an hour to evaluate the teacher and write up observations from the classroom visits.  This can amount to as much as four or more hours per teacher.

Multiply 120 Lansing teachers by 4 hours to get 480 hours.  Add 10 hours of training for five administrators to get 50 more hours (not counting travel time).  Grimm estimates about 400 hours of secretarial and data entry work.  And after an initial one-time training session for all teachers, there will be ongoing training each year for new hires.

If a principal has to evaluate 40 teachers in his or her school, that's 40 hours times at least four hours per teacher.  That comes to at least four 40-hour work weeks out of a principal's school year.  To put that in perspective, a school year includes 36 weeks, so we're talking about 11.1% of each principal's school year.

While some of this work can be done outside of the time when school is in session, most of it has to be done when teachers can be evaluated when they are teaching.  Grimm says that if 10 hours of training teachers in how to assimilate this information and react to teacher ratings is needed, it will take 1200 hours of teacher time for Lansing's 120 teachers.

"That's 120 days of training time," he says.  "That's over a thousand hours right out of the box.  If we had to pay to train them in the summer or after school that would be a cost of about $25,000.  That doesn't include benefits that would add another 20% on top of that.  And there would be some ongoing training costs with new teachers coming in and follow-up." 

Grimm says that training will double the district's professional development expenditures at a time when money is scarce.

Assuming 5 new hires at ten hours of training (plus the trainers) that comes to a total of about 1030 man-hours per year.  That amounts to 23.5 40-hour work weeks.  In addition to the time their pre and post observation interviews takes, teachers will also log into a state database to confirm the data affecting their effectiveness scores is correct.

Grimm estimates that administrator time and training costs the district about $50,000, $5,000 for attendance recording, $12,000 in teacher time, $25,000 in secretary/ data entry time for an annual total of $92,000.  Plus a one-time cost of $25,000 for training the teachers.

There you have it.  One new unfunded mandate is estimated to cost Lansing $117,000 the first year, and $92,000 each additional year.  And that is just one mandate.

Next Week: Comparing Evaluation Systems

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