Hello, My Name is Jim Dropps. I recently moved to the Withrow area with my wife and 3 year old daughter. We are not yet members of the district but I am a home builder and own a small real estate brokerage in MPLS so I was curious about the housing and growth data being used in the BOLD plan. (SLIDE) At the presentation of the BOLD plan on January 7th, district officials showed us the above map and said that the white areas represented areas of no growth, and that the county would actually experience a 5.2% decline in growth and population by 2040 based on the Met Councils projections. (SLIDE)But when I looked at the Met Council report, on the same page as the white and blue map there’s a red map showing significant growth in the entire district, and 45%-90% household growth in the Northern part of the district.(SLIDE) It turns out the 5.2% number they had been using actually refers to a small decline in average people per house. I did get confirmation from the Met Council on this. It appears district officials misunderstood this data when they presented it. I sent my concerns about this to the board Monday night.

And I have some new information as of today. After talking with the Met Council today I learned that they were contacted yesterday with a request for some detailed demographic information on the school district. This information was requested by Dr. Robert McDowell of the BOLD team. To recap for you. I sent the board members my concerns about the demo-graphic data at 5pm on Monday. Tuesday morning one of the main architects of the BOLD plan is then calling and emailing the Met Council for detailed demographic info on our district regarding projected population and households. I also learned that this was the first time district officials had contacted the Met Council for help or information. It appears the extent of their prior research was pulling the white and blue map from the Met Council website.

I ask you board members, respectfully, if you believe these recent actions indicate an administration confident in their demographic research.

I ask you if you believe that those calls to the Met Council for detailed demographic information should have been made 6 months ago, not two weeks before the vote to reshape our district forever.

And I ask you, as I'm sure others will, if knowing this new information now, you believe the BOLD team had likely done enough research prior to proposing this plan.

It is worth noting that the new Met Council data does show increases in nearly every age group in the next 5 years, includ-ing 0-5 year olds, and increases for all age groups through 2030 and 2040.

As alarming as this all may be. There's more. It turns out the actual enrollment projections and capacity numbers being used in the BOLD plan are mainly from a study done by Hazel Reinhardt in 2014 using housing data. These projections have been used to show low capacity in a few schools. (SLIDE)

But when I looked into the study used to make the projections, I discovered they were made using housing data from 2010, 2011, and 2012. Bottom of the barrel, recession era housing numbers. This matters because demographers use home sales to determine how many new kids are coming into the district as each sale often represents a new family with kids. If the housing market had stayed where it was back then we would have accurate enrollment projections. But we all know that did not happen.

We all know that the housing market has been booming for the last few years and is still increasing. When I checked the numbers for 2013-2015 they showed 832 more home sales, or 30% more than the old data. There's complex ratios used to calculate how many students those 832 new families will bring, but what we can certainly understand is that if the underlying data is 30% higher, the resulting enrollment projections should be 30% higher. And it's already begun, the district has been surprised by 41 more students than expected in the last two years, which officials have called “remark-able.” I do not believe it is remarkable at all when you look at the data. Based on these findings, I believe if we close these schools we’ll be back here in a couple years with overcrowding and forced to spend millions on new schools because we sold 3 of them.

So we now have a situation where there's a plan to remake the district, schools and parents are pitted against each other, and it's all based on old data, and no one in this room really knows how many students are showing up this fall. I Believe we need to table this plan. We need to do the actual research. I don’t believe you can reshape a school district, make decisions with millions of dollars of taxpayer money, and take kids out of the schools they love, with outdated, thrown together, last minute data and research. I don't think that is the kind of school district that any of us support and believe in and want to be a part of. Thank you.