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Lies,
Damn Lies and Statistics
Ted Tripp, President, North Andover
Taxpayers Association
(03/06/07)
 This month, let’s take a
step back in history. On February 15, 2000, North Andover
voters went to the polls and by a margin of 3,431 to
1,574 approved the building of a new $58.5 million high
school. Many in town were unhappy with the old high
school built in the 1970s with its open classroom concept
and expensive electric heat. The building was also
showing its age with roof leaks and foundation cracks.
But there was also the issue of an expanding population
and where to put the kids.
At the end of this column is the cover of a
brochure put to-gether by the new-school pro-ponents. You
may remember it; the title was “Our Town Our
Fu-ture.” Next to the cover is the first of several
pages outlining why you should vote for the new school.
Note that the number one reason listed is that room will
be needed by 2005 for the expected 50 percent increase in
high school enrollment. The 1999-2000 enrollment was
stated as around 1000 and the schools expected 500 more
by 2005.
It is now 2007. So, how close did the school department
predictions come?
The simple answer is: Not very close!
This year, 2006-2007, there are about 1365 students in
the high school. Although a year later than 2005, one
might still argue that the 365 student increase is not
too far removed from the projected number. However, in
percentages, it is only a 37 percent increase instead of
the 50 percent figure predicted by the schools.
This, however, is the enrollment number with the new high
school. We know that there was a significant jump in the
number of students when the new school was opened as
parents decided to send their kids to the recently
completed facility.
But what would the enrollment have been in 2005 if the
new school had not been built? That, after all, is what
the school administration was telling us what would
happen if a fancy new school was not approved.
 Table 1 shows the
“transition factors” for the years 1997 to
2006. These are the fractions of 8th grade students going
on to 9th grade. The difference between these numbers and
one represents the fraction of students who did not move
on to the high school in North Andover. The majority of
those most likely went on to attend private school
somewhere in the area.
Note that for the first five years in the table the
transition factor averaged around 0.81. This means 81
percent of 8th graders went on to our high school and 19
percent went elsewhere. The factor increased as the new
high school was under construction and reached a peak of
0.97 when the school opened in 2004. Since then the
transition factors have been decreasing and this school
year dropped down to 0.87. Apparently, many parents who
decided to transition their kids into the new school have
found out that a pretty building does not necessarily
correlate with a private school education.
Let’s go back and look at the numbers if the new
school had not been built. It would not be unreasonable
to assume that the transition factor would remain around
the 0.81 average through 2005 and beyond. Using birth
records and historical grade data, one can put together
the numbers shown in Table 2. This indicates what the
actual and predicted enrollments are and would likely be,
from the year 2001 to 2013, for both the old and new high
schools.
Note that if we had kept the old high school that there
would have been 1176 students present in 2005, not the
1500 the schools predicted. This is an 18 percent
increase, not the 50 percent the schools wanted us to
believe. Since the difference between this and the actual
number of students in the new high school in 2005 is
1365-1179 = 186 students, we can fairly confidently
assume that this is the additional number of students
attending because of the attraction of a new school.
But there is a cost to the town for bringing back these
students who used to go elsewhere. At approximately
$8,000/student, this represents an additional yearly cost
to the town of $1.5 million dollars in 2005 on top of the
town’s financial portion of the $58.5 million new
school. Do you think the School Committee anticipated
this operational budget increase? If it did, why
didn’t it convey this financial information to the
public before the school was voted on? Note, also, that
this extra cost is a significant fraction of the
shortfall in our current school budget. It represents the
salaries of approximately 30-35 teachers that the
district would now like to have.
One can easily argue that North Andover needed a new high
school for numerous reasons. But skyrocketing enrollment
was NOT one of them. Any truthful analysis of enrollment
projections back in 1999 would have shown that the 50
percent increase was without any  foundation whatsoever.
But there should be no surprise with this data. The
School Committee and superintendent who gave us these
bogus predictions were the same people who also gave us
widely inflated numbers to justify the 1998 purchase of
the Foster Farm property with a $1.85 million tax
increase.
In 2006 the $35 million cost of a new elementary school
at Foster Farm was finally put to rest when it became
clear that there would not be enough students to convince
the town to go forward (see “Foster Farm
‘Taxpayer Rip-Off’ – Time to Fess
Up?” in the December 2006 issue of The Valley
Patriot).
And all this brings us around full circle to the title of
this article. Are we looking here at lies, damn lies, or
statistics?
You decide … but I know what I think.
Ted Tripp is an International Consultant in high-tech
manufacturing methods. He has BS and MS degrees in
Chemical Engineering from MIT. You can reach him at tripp@gis.net.
*Send your questions comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com
The March 2007 Edition
of the Valley Patriot
The Valley Patriot is a Monthly
Publication.
All Contents (C) 2007, Valley Patriot, Inc.
We publish 12,000 newspapers and distribute in Andover,
North Andover,
Methuen, Haverhill, Chelmsford, Georgetown, Groveland,
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Salisbury Beach, and Lowell.
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