Hidden costs lurk in approving the JTED program in SCVUSD 35

On Tuesday, Nov.3, voters in the Santa Cruz Valley Unified School District No. 35 will go to the polls for a special election on whether to join Pima County Joint Technological Education District (JTED).

I decided to do some digging into the issue.

Our property taxes have gone up and much of that increase is from education referendums during the last two years. Homeowners have told me that their tax bills for 2010 have increased as much at 30 percent. Many are retired and on fixed incomes.

Pima County JTED has been in existence since 2007 according to the Web site. I was unable to find any specific information about costs from anyone. Calls to Kirk Perrini, coordinator of career and post-secondary counseling at JTED, in Tucson have not been returned.

So I contacted educators with doctoral degrees in education and have experience with school programs including vocational technical training.

We talked about comparative costs to benefits. I was given as a comparison a high-quality math class that can be delivered at a cost of $25 per student. A quality vocational class begins at $300 per student and goes up from there.

Average costs of equipment and aids for math are relatively fixed costs where as a class set up for one vocational technical subject averages about $10,000 per subject and the average maintenance and upkeep runs about 20 percent of that cost per year, or an additional $2,000 per class per year.

Another factor that was stressed was the general educational level of the student and, in particular, his or her reading comprehension level.

Generally, vocational technical classes should be cutting-edge to be of value to the student preparing for a future job. Because of the rapid advances in technology, the complexity of the training changes on a near daily basis. The student must read at least at the 12th-grade level and above just to keep up in class.

I asked one of the professors what he would advise.

He said once a JTED-like program is started the first thing that happens is that it tries to expand to lower its daily costs per student. This is because they soon find out a JTED program has many hidden costs, much like an iceberg, where only a fraction of the actual costs are visible above the surface.

He said that if the initial and recurring costs plus the complexity of running such a program were made clear up front, very few school districts would opt for JTED.

Pima Community College once had a branch here in Santa Cruz County. We now have various other post-secondary educational offerings, including Cochise College, University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University.

A yes vote on the JTED proposal would increase the taxes on each home in the district by $5 per 100,000 of assessment and would generate between $60,000 and $90,000 for SCVUSD that would be matched by state educational funds by a multiplier yet to be determined.

For Rio Rico High School (RRHS) to participate in the Pima JTED program, it will involve students traveling to Tucson and back for each class. That means two hours of the educational period would be taken up by travel.

As I recall, RRHS had a crisis recently wherein about half of their senior class at mid-term were not meeting minimum requirements for graduation. I also believe that RRHS has had three different principals in as many years.

Clearly, the first purpose of the high school is to provide a quality basic education in reading, writing and arithmetic in a stable academic environment. Only after these basic educational goals are met should they look outward and consider incorporating other educational programs into the curriculum.

(Editor’s note: Taylor is a resident of Rio Rico.)