There are several Onslow County citizens that have been trying to stop the infliction of Common Core on the education system of this county.  We have tried to educate our fellow citizens in meetings and face to face discussions, as well as informing the County School Board about this “progressive” educational inhibitor. 

Recently I had the opportunity to talk before the school board about the increase in the school budget this would cause, but was only allowed 3 minutes.  I did not get to finish what needed to be said, so that information is what follows.

—————————————————————

My thanks to the Onslow County School Board for this opportunity to speak.

What I have to talk about has to do with the budget for the Onslow County School system and the affect Common Core will have on it.  According to the state of North Carolina, the cost for the Common Core Standards is an increase of $389 per student.  I am not sure if that is correct. 

There are Professional Development courses that are required to train the teachers on the new Common Core academic standards and methods.  This Professional Teacher Development will cost $1,931 per teacher.  There are 1,565 teachers.  That is a cost of $3,022,015.  There are the 26 Instructional Coordinators that are in the system and they will need the training.  That cost is $50,206.  I don’t know if the teacher’s assistants or the Instructional Aids will need the training, but there are 527 of them.  That would be a cost of $1,017,637.  This runs to a total of $4,089,858.  This is with a student to teacher ratio of 15 to 1. 

The records show the current student testing cost is about $10 per student.  The student testing under Common Core will go to $28 or $29 per student.  That is an increase of $18 or $19 per test per student.  The test questions will be made public after the test so each year new questions and tests will need to be developed so the cost will just go up.  These tests are purchased from an outside source.  According to the county records there are 24,046 students. With the increase in student testing charges of $18 or $19 per student per test that means the increase in testing cost will be $456,874.

I could not find any information on the cost of new text books that would be needed, so I am going to project a cost of $30 per book and I think that will be low.  This would be approximately $750,000 or in other terms, three quarters of a million dollars.  

So far that comes to a total increase in spending of $5,296,732.  Some of this will be one-time expenditures, but much will be reoccurring cost that will do nothing but climb over the years until the county and state can no longer carry the load and we have to turn our entire educational system over to the Federal Government.

This increase in cost does not include the cost of upgrades and improvements to local infrastructure.  Common Core testing in North Carolina will have to be taken on computers.  The state and local education authorities will have to examine concerns about bandwidths and technology.  Are there enough computers? Are the schools wired for the extra power requirements?  If they are going to be hardwired, are the schools wired for this with Cat-6 wiring?  Or are all the computers going to be on Wi-Fi with a central server in each school or will each school need several servers?  How about the additional bandwidth needed to connect each school with the central offices of the school system?  How often will the school system need to upgrade the computers in the classrooms?  Who pays for that?  I am guessing that will be the local county taxpayer.