Cabrillo candidates spar over enrollment By MATT KAPKO Half Moon Bay Review October 27, 2004 It all depends on how you read the numbers. State bureaucrats and school board candidates for the Cabrillo Unified School District have reached different conclusions on school enrollment projections and their conclusions have led them to important distinctions. The seemingly simple task of counting heads at district schools has become a sparring issue between two candidates - Charles Gardner and Jonathan Lundell. Each has taken a much different position and is proposing opposing agendas for the district's future based on their conclusions. The Facilities Master Plan, which the school district has used since its passage in 1997, projected district-wide enrollment to be approaching 5,000 students by now. However, it only enrolled 3,633 students during the 2003-2004 school year. As a result, Lundell takes issue with enrollment projections mostly because the new middle school planned for Wavecrest was based on those eight-year-old growth formulas. Even the California Department of Finance at the time projected a much lower rate of growth, projecting district-wide enrollment to be at approximately 4,000 students now. The department computes school growth projections for counties, so some approximate calculations are required in order to break it down by school districts. During the 1995-1996 school year when the district began planning for future facilities and successfully convinced voters to pass a bond measure to fund a new middle school, district-wide enrollment was 3,688 students. There were 875 middle-school students that year. Last year's middle-school enrollment stood at 828 students, although the FMP projected it to surpass 1,200 students by now. Regardless, the FMP and finance department projections have proved to be high. Enrollment generally peaked throughout the district in 1997 and has slowly decreased each year since then. Moseley, who's distanced himself from the back-and-forth arguments over enrollment projections, has concerns but doesn't think they are serious enough to drop plans for a new middle school at Wavecrest. "It's become an obsolete document," he said of the FMP, adding that it's wrong to use it now as a tool for future planning growth. "They were off. They were wildly off," he said. "We now know that many of those assumptions are false." That said, Moseley doesn't think the FMP should be the focus of campaign debate. "We still need a school built," he said. "Regrettably this is the dominant piece on the campaign." Lundell, however, has made an issue of the false projections for years. He has pleaded with the school board to review the document and align it with reality. "That projection is what we're building to," he said, of the Wavecrest plan. "That gap has gotten bigger every year." While he's critical of some things that went into the FMP, he thinks it's much more egregious that the district hasn't reviewed it for more than eight years. "To say that our hands are tied ... is just wrong," he said. "These are all starting points for conversation. It's frustrating a little bit that the board doesn't want to address it. "If you were in kindergarten when that bond passed you're in high school now," he said. Gardner recognizes the fluctuations in enrollment between 1996 and now, but focuses on then and now, not the in-between years. "In '96 the schools were overcrowded and they are today," he said. "There is a difference in perspective," he said, referring to Lundell's figures. "I would rather have one classroom too many than one too few," he said. He and Lundell each provided graphs showing enrollment figures and projections. Both of them are on par with the actual enrollment figures provided by the California Department of Education for the past decade. But Gardner expects more growth in the future, while Lundell is unconvinced. While the state finance department projections show public school enrollment steadily dropping countywide through the 2011-2012 school year, Gardner argues that it will bottom out in 2009 and then steadily increase for the following decade. When asked how he reached that conclusion, he said it was coming from the state finance department, but it only projects enrollment 10 years ahead. Gardner said the state projects growth to resume in 2009, but the department's figures don't show support that argument. "The point is, you can take numbers and make them look however you want them to look like," Gardner said. He continued to argue that Lundell's figures are off. Gardner's figures only depart from Lundell's reasoning beginning in 2009. Lundell said he doesn't make his own projections; he merely relies on data from the state. Home