Thursday, August 18, 2011

How much time would you have put into this decision?


Yesterday, the Parents' Coalition for Montgomery County shared an April 20th email from Mr. Jeffrey Bourne, Chief of the Division of Facilities and Capital Programs of the Montgomery County Department of Recreation. As previously mentioned, Mr. Bourne's email raises the question of whether the B-CC middle school #2 site selection report, dated March 8th, was secretly modified afterwards.

However, the email raises an additional question: How much time did the site selection committee actually take to, um, select a site?

The site selection report lists only two meetings of the committee: One on December 14, and one on January 25. Mr. Bourne's email refers to the January meeting as "the announcement meeting". This implies that the committee spent only a single meeting, that of December 14, actually evaluating candidate sites, and making their selection.

We have previously been informed that committee members did not visit the sites. Now it appears that they spent only a single meeting evaluating and selecting sites. Assuming that the meeting was a couple of hours long, and given that there were ten candidate sites, that works out to about twelve minutes per site.

Is twelve minutes per site a reasonable way to make a 50 million dollar decision that will affect the education of generations of students?

No comments: