How Can Schools Cope with Base Re-Alignments?
When the Pentagon announced a major expansion of Fort Benning, Ga., two and a half years ago, Muscogee County school officials went on red alert. An invasion was coming. With the military base’s expansion expected to bring as many as 45,000 new residents to the region, the school system was looking at the arrival of at least 8,000 new students within five years.
Since then, school officials have been scurrying. They’ve met with military leaders to determine exactly when these new families will arrive, and they’ve worked with county planners to anticipate where new housing will be built. They’ve looked for likely sites for new schools, and they’ve lobbied lawmakers to help the district cope with the daunting financial demands of adding so many new students in so little time.
“We’ll probably need at least three or four new schools -- that’s still to be determined -- at a cost of about $50 million,” says Deputy Superintendent Robin Pennock. “We have engaged in very detailed planning ... but it can be a little overwhelming.”
Others wish they had such problems. In Wheatland, Calif., Superintendent Debra Pearson is confronted by the repercussions of cutbacks at nearby Beale Air Force Base. The district once operated three schools on base, but over the years, more than 850 military housing units have been shut down as personnel transferred elsewhere, and the loss of families has led to a slump in enrollment and budget cutbacks that forced the closing of a school three years ago.
“It’s been very disruptive,” says Pearson, adding that the cutbacks upset parents and strained relations with the teachers’ union. “We’ve had to do layoffs and rely on attrition [to cut back staff]. hen I first arrived in this district, we had 100 teachers. We’re down to 70 right now.”
Similar stories -- good and bad, all with hardships attached -- can be found across the country these days. A surprising number of districts are feeling the effects of a massive redeployment of U.S. military troops. A score of military installations are closing and others are shrinking as personnel transfer to other facilities. At the same time, the Pentagon has moved some forces stateside from overseas and wants to expand the U.S. Army by 74,000 by 2010.
For some school districts, base closings mean a sharp decline in the local economy and an accompanying drop in student enrollment and revenues. But unlike the federal government’s previous BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) efforts, which resulted in the shutdown of more than 300 installations nationwide in the late 1980s and 1990s, the most dramatic impact today centers on 11 states where military institutions are experiencing significant growth. Schools in those states face the challenge of accommodating more than 75,000 new students by 2011.
“Schools traditionally have been impacted around military bases, but what’s happening with growth in some areas, particularly because of a lack of on-base housing, means the parameters of this impact are broadening to other school districts that normally have not been impacted,” says John Forkenbrock, executive director of the National Association of Federally Impacted Schools (NAFIS). “Now we’re seeing some growth that’s phenomenal.”
Who pays for classrooms?
Phenomenal describes what school officials are seeing in Muscogee County, home to Fort Benning, a sprawling 182,000-acre installation that’s home to the U.S. Army Infantry School and 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. Already, more than 100,000 troops and civilian personnel work daily on this base, which will soon see the transfer of the Army Armor School from Fort Knox, Ky., the expansion of the base’s 75th Ranger Regiment, and the consolidation and arrival of other units.
So many people are expected to move to Fort Benning that growth likely will spill over into neighboring Harris, Marion, Muscogee, Talbot, and Chattahoochee counties in Georgia, and Lee and Russell counties across the Alabama border. Some of these counties are quiet, rural areas previously unaffected by military decisions. But with as many as 17,000 new jobs coming to the region, local and state officials have set up a task force to plan for new housing, road construction, and the laying of new water and sewer lines.
For school officials, the challenge is to supply classrooms for as many as 20,000 students that will descend on the seven counties by the 2010-11 school year. That means finding a way to raise $100 million or more for new school construction.
Those financial needs are very much on the minds of officials in Muscogee County, where construction costs have spiraled upward in recent years. Housing developers have snatched up large parcels of land that would make good school sites, Pennock says, and “per-square-foot construction costs have skyrocketed. We built an elementary school in 2000 for $78 per square foot; we opened one last month for $178 per square foot.”
The district has turned to state and federal lawmakers for help, but so far there’s little to show for it. Approximately 40 percent of federal impact aid funds -- money that compensates school systems that cannot tax federal land -- goes to districts educating military children. But the money only helps offset operational costs and is available only after new students arrive. No major federal program currently helps with construction or other transitional costs that districts confront because of the growth or closure of nearby military installations.
That’s a sore point for John Deegan, superintendent of Nebraska’s Bellevue Public Schools and executive director of the Military Impacted Schools Association (MISA). Members of Congress and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) “want to talk about hiring teachers and dealing with facilities,” he says. “They have lots of meetings and discussions, but there’s no money. They hire consultants to tell you want you can do and shouldn’t, but there’s no money.”
Planning early, lobbying hard
Yet the lobbying continues. In Maryland, which expects 45,000 to 60,000 military, civilian, and private-sector jobs to be created by base realignments, a state task force of political and business leaders are preparing for billions of dollars in roads, schools, and other public-service infrastructure needs. State leaders have successfully lobbied for more federal highway funds, sought legislative earmarks in Congress, and considered proposals ranging from tax increases to floating new bonds.
In Anne Arundel County, which expects the expansion at Fort Meade and the National Security Agency headquarters to bring 15,000 to 30,000 new residents to the area, school officials “are looking at around 7,000 kids” arriving over the next decade, says Greg Nourse, the school system’s assistant superintendent for business and management services.
With a 70,000 enrollment, the district is looking at a 10-percent boost, making it no worse off than the country’s other fast-growing areas. But school officials are hustling. Last year, they obtained $2.5 million from the county for school planning, and Nourse says attendance boundaries are being re-examined. Options include modular classrooms and school additions, led by a planned $22 million, 65,000-square-foot elementary school that should open by 2011, when the influx of new students is expected to quicken.
Meanwhile, a group called the Seven Rivers National Coalition, a group of military communities, called on federal officials to pony up millions of dollars -- some estimates suggest $1 billion is needed -- to build schools last year. The proposal ultimately went nowhere. The Muscogee schools were part of that coalition, and Pennock remembers how school officials “just went door to door, meeting with our senators and representatives.” Despite agreeing that a need existed, Congress did not fund a modest $7 million program in the DOD budget that was earmarked to help schools facing major enrollment changes due to base realignments.
Included in these policy discussions is DOD’s Office of Economic Adjustment, tasked with providing technical and financial assistance to communities adversely affected by realignments. The problem now, according to Director Patrick O’Brien, is impact aid funds are “very focused and have limited resources.” But, he says, the DOD has agreed to advocate for additional assistance for struggling districts.
Until then, schools are essentially breaking new ground, says O’Brien. “In contrast to the downsizing process, where considerable community experience resides from the previous four rounds of BRAC, there isn’t a framework for these growth communities and their school districts. In some respects, these growth communities are now pioneering efforts to capably respond to the projected growth.”
Not helping matters is that some lawmakers are skeptical when school officials go to Capitol Hill to seek help for massive enrollment growth, Forkenbrock says. “The bottom line is that [the growth] hasn’t happened yet. We’ve even seen a drop in kids over the last four years in some districts rather than an increase. So I’m going up to Capitol Hill and saying the sky is falling ... but we’ve not seen a major explosion in growth, which makes me look like an idiot.”
On top of this, there’s yet another wrinkle. Since 1996, the Pentagon has been turning over responsibility for military housing to the private sector, and more housing is being built outside military bases in neighboring communities. For school districts, that’s a problem because the federal government lowers impact aid payments for students who live outside a base.
No one is more aware of the implications of this housing trend than Superintendent Billy Walker of Texas’ Randolph Field Independent School District. Every student whose family moves into the community means a 45-percent cut in his district’s impact aid. Now that 65 percent of his military students live off base, the small district has seen impact aid revenues fall $1 million on a budget that today is only $12 million.
That figure would be only 20 percent for off-base students, except for a provision that ups the formula for school districts with high enrollments from military installations, Walker says. “Even so, we need two students off base to get the same revenue as one on base,” he says. “So what we’re looking at is a reduction in our federal revenue.”
Preparing for the kids
No question, funding and construction dominate the current debate surrounding military impacted schools and today’s redeployments. But school officials say they’re turning some attention to the educational challenges that come with a big influx of military children.
Although these students, on average, do as well or better academically than the general population, they have a high mobility rate. On average, “military brats” move six times during their school years, which means some effort must be put into helping students make the transition to a new curriculum and get them on track with their classmates, officials say.
In Kansas’ Geary County Unified School District, that transition includes programs to identify children at risk right away -- starting with pregnant mothers and continuing through high school, says Superintendent Ronald Walker. Also, faced with younger soldiers than in years past, the district is seeing more young mothers with young children, so officials are working to expand day care facilities as well.
Finally, any enrollment growth -- military or civilian -- means greater demands on the district’s education or bilingual education services, he adds. For example, it’s not unusual for soldiers to marry while overseas and return stateside with spouses and children with limited English skills.
Already, Geary County’s program for English Language Learners (ELL) has expanded, prompting the 6,400-student district to form a partnership with Kansas State University to assist in training staff members for ELL certification. And with parts of the 1st Infantry Division and 1st Armored Division scheduled to redeploy to Fort Riley this year from Europe, the demand is only going to increase.
“We get students from all over the world,” Walker says. “In any given year, we may have children speaking 50 to 57 languages to teach and educate. We’re not the typical rural Kansas area.”
Almost universally, communities welcome the arrival of new troops and their families -- and the economic boom created by new housing and business development to serve an expanded base. But, in a rare exception, school officials in North Shore School District 12, outside Chicago, last fall had to address a slight dustup as they prepared for 200 military families who will arrive next year -- and a total of 375 by 2011 -- from nearby Naval Station Great Lakes, the largest training center in the U.S. Navy.
Some parents had hoped school officials would distribute the new arrivals to lessen the impact of mobility rates at any particular school. A petition that the Chicago Tribune reported as containing “inflammatory rhetoric,” including suggestions that military students would require special services and hurt test scores, brought an ugly tinge to the debate and upset some military families. But school officials moved quickly to quash such talk, and the issue was resolved by a school board vote in December on a new enrollment plan.
The community also moved quickly to let military families know they were welcome, says school spokeswoman Linda Carlstone. Some schools decided to reach out by organizing welcome committees, recruiting parents to serve as mentors to newly arriving families, or by distributing “welcome bags” that include a school T-shirt, a restaurant coupon book, and school information.
“It was only a few people saying untrue things, but we couldn’t let that spread,” says Carlstone. “We had to undo the damage. So the school district and community members came forward, and we said we valued military children in our schools. We needed to send a message and speak out louder that we wanted and appreciated this group.”
Like it or not, when the Pentagon says a military installation is growing or shrinking, school officials can do little but salute -- and make plans to get ready.
And that’s exactly what Muscogee County school officials are doing. “We have a very special relationship with Fort Benning,” Pennock says. “We view as a deeply felt mission in this school system to provide the very best for military children. n
Del Stover (dstover@nsba.org) is a senior editor of American School Board Journal.
Number crunching is key in preparing for new students
Numbers and statistics: Assistant Superintendent Dave Roudebush is relying heavily on them to help plan for growth in Colorado’s Fountain-Fort Carson School District 8.
Approximately half of all incoming military personnel to nearby Fort Carson are married, and, on average, each family will include 0.6 children, he says. Of those, 68 percent will be of school age.
A soldier’s age and rank, along with assignment to combat or support units, also affects the likelihood of a military family having school-aged children.
“The latest [base realignment] resulted in about 5,100 soldiers coming to Fort Carson,” Roudebush says. “So once you do the math on that, it means those 5,100 soldiers bring in about 1,040 students.”
Until a few years ago, statistics gathered from the U.S. Army and other military-impacted school districts made it possible for officials to develop formulas that provided very accurate projections for the future.
But that’s changing with the Army’s recent push to privatize military housing and push more soldiers off base, Roudebush says. With more soldiers forced to search for private housing in neighboring communities, it’s hard to predict how many will end up living within the district’s boundaries.
With another 4,500 soldiers expected to arrive at Fort Carson by 2010-11, however, school officials must do the best they can. “We are working closely with the garrison commander to get good information,” Roudebash says, “so it doesn’t catch us by surprise.”
Working with state task force helps local officials adapt to fast growth
When it was announced that the military would nearly double the number of troops deployed at Fort Riley, Kan., the nearby Geary County Unified School District had a student enrollment of about 5,900.
Today, enrollment is a little over 7,000, and school officials expect another 2,000 to 3,000 students to show up in the next few years.
The implications to the district’s budget, instruction, and future construction were huge, so Superintendent Ronald Walker was quick to join a state task force created by the governor to prepare for Fort Riley’s growth. Walker ended up as chair of the task force’s education subcommittee.
Planning, communications, and collaboration are key to making things happen, Walker says. One important result of working with state officials was new legislation changing the rules on state aid distribution, which will allow schools to count military children for aid when they enroll -- instead of the past practice of leaving those children uncounted if they arrived after the official September count date.
“That means we can have funds to handle all the transition that takes place,” he says. “It was really important.”
Using information gathered by state and military officials, Geary County leaders also made the case to taxpayers for a $33 million bond issue -- the first in half a century -- to build two new schools. Walker says the funds “helped with some growth issues, but of course, it’s catching up with us again. But at least the bond issue got us ahead of the curve.”
Air Force asks contractor to finance school addition
How does a school system with less than 1,000 students find the money to build classrooms for a sizable enrollment increase within the next two to three years?
For Colorado’s Ellicott School District, the trick is to work closely with the commander of Schriever Air Force Base and the private contractor building off-base housing. In a unique arrangement, the contractor’s government deal to build 242 homes for military personnel included paying for a 10-classroom, $2.3 million addition to the elementary school across from the development.
As far as Superintendent Terry Ebert knows, this is the first time the Air Force has asked a private developer to pay for school construction as a condition for a multi-million-dollar contract. But asking local voters to finance a bond for construction wasn’t possible because the district is still paying off a 2001 construction project.
Approximately $200,000 of the cost will be paid with local tax money to cover furniture and other nonconstruction costs, he says. But the money is well-spent. The elementary school already was crowded, and the district is “looking at a 15 percent to 20 percent increase in our student population.”
School officials, along with representatives from Schriever, broke ground on the addition in February. “It really has been delightful,” Ebert says, “to be able to talk to community people and say this really isn’t going to cost local taxpayers a lot of money -- that it comes out of federal taxes.”
Base closings hurt for a while, but communities do recover
Nearly a decade after the Pentagon shut the gates of Fort McClellan, Ala., the Calhoun County Schools are seeing the local economy turn around -- and student enrollment is starting to rise again.
Once an important source of civilian jobs and business, Fort McClellan -- home to the U.S. Army’s Chemical and Military Police schools and a training brigade -- was closed in 1999. Calhoun County lost nearly 10,000 jobs.
Because several districts served military families who lived on the base, Calhoun County Schools saw enrollment drop by only about 400 students, Superintendent Judy Stiefel says. Still, the loss of federal impact aid and the harm done to the local economy was painful.
“It was an impact, but it was not devastation,” Stiefel says.
As other communities nationwide have discovered, however, a closed military base, especially if situated on prime real estate, can be turned into an opportunity for new economic development. The base, renamed the McClellan community, proved just that. Abandoned office buildings and homes, with roads and water and sewer lines intact, proved attractive to a university and community college that set up satellite campuses on the former base. Residential areas, a private school, and several new businesses are now located in the area.
Sales tax revenues also are back up, and “they’ve just built a new Lowe’s, and more businesses are opening back up on this side of town,” Stiefel says.
Districts face changes with BRAC
By Charles Maranzano Jr.
With President Bush’s approval of the Base Realignment and Closure Act, U.S. military bases in 11 states will be hit by significant population increases over the next several years. But while members of Congress and the Department of Defense went through a prolonged planning process to consider the economic implications of closing bases in other parts of the country, they did not do so for those that will experience sudden growth.
And nowhere is this more apparent than the public schools.
At least 50 school districts will face challenges as a result of BRAC. My district, Dinwiddie County Public Schools, is one of the systems that will be affected by this increase over the next several years.
Located about 25 miles south of Richmond, Va., Dinwiddie County has 4,687 students, a number that has grown by 500 over the past decade. Given our proximity to Richmond and to Fort Lee, one of the bases that is expected to see dramatic growth, our small county (population less than 25,000) is braced for a tsunami.
In 2005, I joined school superintendents from across the country in the Seven Rivers Coalition for Military Growth. The river was a geographical feature associated with each of the seven identified military bases in Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia.
According to the population projections provided by the U.S. Army and applied to the seven military bases impacted by BRAC, more than 70,000 children associated with these expected changes would become displaced. With military families already experiencing extreme stress and personnel risking life and limb over the global war on terrorism, the relocation of children to areas of the country without additional school capacities could be overwhelming.
School construction traditionally has been a local function, with expansion of public school facilities absorbed by local taxpayers, primarily homeowners according to most common state funding formulas. Building new schools typically requires local bond efforts with some degree of state support. In some areas of the country, the land acquisition process alone is time consuming and cumbersome.
Under the design-build process, an average school may take up to three years to construct. Localities must also fund the teaching, resources, and administrative staff for these buildings. Consider also the busing, cafeteria, electrical, heating and cooling, and maintenance costs. Federal impact aid could help pay the way for teaching staff and some limited resources, but not for bricks and mortar.
In Dinwiddie County, we recently completed the construction of a new elementary school and are building a new high school that will open at the start of the 2008-09 school year. The new Sutherland Elementary School, which opened in January, is the first new school facility in the county in 28 years. It replaces a 40-year-old campus that had used 17 trailers for more than a decade.
Trailers don’t make good classroom space, and they are not a long-term solution. But if new schools aren’t built, districts that are affected by BRAC will have to use them, along with the cafeteria, auditorium, media center, hallways, closets, and storerooms.
Localities should not be expected to bear the cost of new school construction, but that is what is happening. Our coalition identified significant needs, but our requests were rejected by the federal government. Last year, Congress agreed that something needed to be done, but they refused to fund a $7 million program in the Department of Defense budget to help affected school districts.
This is something that can -- and should -- be done. If not, the ones who will pay are the children of our servicemen and women. And that would be a shame.
Charles Maranzano (cmaranzano@ dcpsnet.org) is superintendent of Dinwiddie County Schools in Dinwiddie, Va.