Los Angeles Unveils $578 Million Public School

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an Associated Press report on next month's opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles: "With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation's most expensive public school ever. The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of 'Taj Mahal' schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities. ... At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex's namesake, a manicured public park, and a state-of-the-art swimming pool. 'There's no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the '70s where kids felt, "Oh, back to jail,"' said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. 'Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.' ... Critics note that nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed, the district faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing."

Comments

Re:Good, but

[Ethanol-fueled]

No. Unlike the Southern religious hypocrisy, we Californians are into a "green" kind of hypocrisy.

Take, for example, a mandate that buildings have flushless urinals installed to save water. Yet, the same buildings often feature auto-flushing toilets which flush everytime you wipe your ass(that is, at least twice, and often more) where each flush has enough power to swallow a basketball-sized dump. Wasteful, and very hypocritical.

I can think of better uses for $500 million

[Shivetya]

dollars in the education budget, like improving science? They could have probably added enough computers to the LA school system to guarantee access to all students. The number of dollars here is just mind boggling. When a school system like LA is dropping teachers right and left over budget problems where is the criminal investigation to put the people who signed off on this?

If they had spent this money on something other than a school you can damn well bet people would be bitching "think of the children".

This is a monument to the school board. It should be the head stone.

Re:I can think of better uses for $500 million

[_Sharp'r_]

Get back to us with your expected lifespan for the building, then we'll look for LA's.

The expected lifespan of the building we built was 50+ years. It's a purpose-build modern public school with all the amenities like commercial kitchen, science labs, art labs, full size basketball gym, sports fields, playgrounds, common area, theater, music and language rooms, administration office space, parking lots, teacher prep rooms, library 3x the size of any other in the community, special education facilities, student gardens, sprinklers, internal steel fire and emergency doors, commercial wire plant, elevator, etc...

It's not like $9 million doesn't get you a lot, even today.... these guys spent almost $140K/student? There is no measurement by which that is a "reasonable" amount...

Re:I can think of better uses for $500 million

[queazocotal]

Bare numbers?
You can't do simply use cost/pupil-year that the building will remain standing as a metric.

For example.
Spend 78 million on a new building, have 500 million left over.

Invest this with a return of 8%.

The returns will allow you to hire well over 500 extra staff.

And in 20 years, your initial 500 million is now around 1.2 billion.

Inflation will have torn into that somewhat - but you can still easily afford to knock the school down and build a new one.

I would also suggest that the students would perform far, far, far better with a student-teacher ratio of around 5:1 that this would enable than the tiny effect of a shiny building.

Maintenance Cost

[BondGamer]

With a price tag like that, the upkeep is going to be astronomical. When they upgraded our local school to have air conditioning, they couldn't turn it on because it would cost ~$25,000 just to start! They are also talking about turning a perfectly good grass field into astroturf at a cost of 1 million dollars.

Re:it's all about accountability

[Bryansix]

Freakonomics showed this statistically to be true as well. They looked at students who entered a lottery to go to a new charter school. The parents had to register the students for the lottery. They showed that ALL the kids who entered the lottery did better in school if they went to the charter school (they won the lottery) or not (they lost the lottery). The point was that if their parents cares enough to enter them in the lottery then they would do better then the majority of the rest of the school kids. That being said, it is just a waste of time to send your kid to a crappy school. My wife for instance learns new things that I was taught in 8th grade. Her school almost got taken over by the State and mine was one of the top in the state.

Re:Who approved this, and why weren't they fired?

[31415926535897]

Who approved this, and why weren't they fired?

Sadly, the citizens of the bankrupt state.

Re:State-of-the-Art Swimming Pool?

[wiredlogic]

That's all well and good but at the end of the day this is a pool for high school students, not Olympic athletes. I wonder what the premium was for incorporating all the fancy design compared to a normal low tech pool.

Re:blame it partly on the procurement process

[Rich0]

Ah, the insanity of modern laws.

What on earth is the harm in NOT borrowing too much money. Borrow a billion dollars to build a bridge, and the project gets done for $750M - what to do with the extra cash. Do we:

A. Repay some of the bond with it (saving tons of public funds in debt repayment).

B. Blow the money on anything remotely bridge-related (let's repaint it 10 times in the first two years, put in a fancy lightshow, and pave it with gold).

Of course, we write the laws so that only B is a valid option...