Miami Herald: Broward schools have too many empty seats

The Miami Herald published this article on November 3, 2009.

BY PATRICIA MAZZEI

pmazzei@MiamiHerald.com

For years, the Broward school district continued building new schools even after student enrollment began to drop, knowing the state would soon put the brakes on the school system’s construction program.

Now the district faces the politically charged problem of having to shuffle thousands of students to different schools as boundaries are realigned to balance schools with too few and too many students.

When board members meet on Tuesday, they will begin to unravel how the district ended up with so much extra space that the state has ordered it to stop building schools.

In all, Broward has about 32,000 more seats than students to fill them. Most underenrolled schools are in the eastern part of the county, while several schools in the southwest remain overcrowded.

Board members are already getting heat for a planned boundary change this year to Pioneer Middle School in Cooper City, which would move hundreds of students east to Hollywood.

Concern about overbuilding has been fueled by the September arrest of suspended board member Beverly Gallagher for allegedly taking $12,500 in kickbacks from undercover FBI agents posing as contractors.

But the story begins in the late 1990s, when Broward couldn’t build schools quickly enough for its booming suburbs.

DISTRICT’S PLAN

With seemingly endless growth, the district easily justified the building of new schools — a process state officials review every five years. A plan issued in 2001 predicted more students and, in turn, more schools through 2006.

But the district’s enrollment began to dip — for the first time since the 1970s — in the 2005-06 school year. And instead of getting a new survey, the state granted Broward three one-year extensions to its existing one, allowing the district to continue to build based on enrollment projections quickly becoming obsolete.

Broward asked for the extensions largely because it disagreed with the state’s projections, which showed the district having fewer students than the district estimated, Superintendent Jim Notter said. The state’s numbers are still lower, he added.

Districts can, and often do, request extensions for reasons such as needing more time to review enrollment data or after a hurricane, said Tom Inserra, an educational facilities planning administrator at Florida’s education department who granted Broward’s last extension.

“Especially in the larger [districts], that’s not unusual at all,” he said.

NEW SURVEY

Under the new 2009-14 survey, and with a shrinking construction budget, School Board members scrapped dozens of new planned schools and classroom additions in August. Among those were projects the board approved — and the district started spending money on — after receiving the survey’s preliminary results last November.

One of those projects, a 24-classroom addition at Westglades Middle School in Parkland, drew scrutiny from Dave Rhodes, director of the district’s facility audits.

Records show Rhodes refused to sign off moving the project along — someone else did — because it had been approved under the old survey. And the new, preliminary survey suggested Parkland didn’t need more seats.

“It is problematic that the District continues to add capacity in our facilities without clearly documented needs,” Rhodes wrote in a Jan. 27 e-mail to Thomas Cooney, an attorney for the district. In the e-mail, Rhodes estimated the school district spent $300 million on classroom additions since 2005.

The state survey, which looks at a district wide picture, doesn’t identify individual schools with extra space. Superintendent Notter has asked the state to take a closer look at several middle and high schools in western Broward that the district considers in need of additional space.

The district’s annual enrollment count shows most of its underenrolled schools are in eastern Broward, where some building is taking place.

But much of that work is to renovate schools in disrepair, construction chief Michael Garretson and others say.

At Blanche Ely High School in Pompano Beach, for example, building new classrooms will allow the district to demolish older, unsafe ones.

Garretson told The Miami Herald last week that red flags about overbuilding weren’t raised until last year, when the new state survey was looming. Knowing a halt to construction was coming, he urged his staff to get projects put to bid quickly before it was too late.

“I even told the staff that if we didn’t get the contracts in [last] year, we wouldn’t get them at all,” Garretson said.

On Tuesday, district staff will tell board members that Broward has about 15,000 empty seats, not counting those in existing portable classrooms.

Notter said Monday one of the reasons the district kept building was that it had a long-term goal to get rid of portables, which parents have resoundly rejected in the past and often aren’t counted when Broward cities and counties measure overcrowding.

But if the alternative for parents is sending their children to schools further east, that might change, he added.

Said Notter: “Now it’s, `Keep my kid in a portable.’ ”

Miami Herald staff writer Hannah Sampson contributed to this report.