The Lawrence school board on Monday approved a contract with an outside consultant to create an enrollment analysis for the district that will include five-year projections.
RSP & Associates is the firm that worked with the district on its budget planning process last year, and that the district has worked with dating back to 2005.
With a vote of 6-1, board members during their meeting on Monday approved the contract with the Overland Park-based firm that will cost up to $80,000 from the general fund this year. Carole Cadue-Blackwood was the sole board member in opposition.
“I think that it would benefit this community or this board if we consider bidding this out,” Cadue-Blackwood said. “Because it seems like this just keeps getting tacked on and tacked on, some of these bills, these costs.”
Chief Operations Officer Larry Englebrick said the district could bid out the contract in the future and seek proposals from other companies, but the state doesn’t require that.
“It’s a professional service,” Englebrick said. “Many times those are not bid out, but if that is the desire, it can be bid out. It would be a lengthy process to do correctly.”
The district has hired RSP several times, dating back 18 years, Englebrick told the board on Monday. In August 2022, the district agreed to a $120,000 contract for RSP to lead its 2023-24 budget planning process. Recently, the board increased the firm’s contract by approximately 23% for its “additional work” related to school closures.
Englebrick said the district is also set to work with RSP on its new middle school boundaries, which will be created ahead of Liberty Memorial Central Middle School’s restructuring next year.
He said administrators provided revised elementary school boundaries last year later than community members would’ve liked, and they hope to improve the timing this go around. Boundaries and related information should be available to families by the beginning of March 2024, Engelbrick said, so that they have more time to make decisions best for them.
Board member GR Gordon-Ross said he would be in favor of bidding the contract out eventually, but the current timing wouldn’t allow that.
“I do agree with you that what happened last year when we got the data late and we got boundaries late and we impacted families, we impacted the enrollment process, we impacted all those things,” Gordon-Ross said. “… If we were to bring in a whole new company once the bid process finished, to try to pick up where they left off, I don’t see it feasible that we could finish by the beginning of March if we were to start to bid it now, and I think that would be problematic to meet those goals.”
Superintendent Anthony Lewis is going on his sixth year with the district, and he said when he first arrived, RSP was providing analyses every year. In an effort to save money, and because annual projections weren’t necessary, Lewis said the district switched to a five-year rotation. He also said an administrator used to do some of the work RSP is currently doing, but due to budget cuts, the district removed the position.
Lewis told the board that RSP’s projections have always been accurate during his time in the district thus far; if numbers were off, they were only slightly off. He said he sees the firm’s methods as unique and valuable.
“If we do bid it out, we may find that they are maybe a sole source when it comes to some of the models that we need to accurately predict this,” Lewis said.
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Data included in RSP’s enrollment analysis will project the enrollment at each building for the next five years with the current school boundaries and will be presented in the form of tables, graphs, charts and maps. The district on Sept. 20 did its annual enrollment count, which will contribute to the report along with facility and boundary information.
There may be discrepancies between RSP’s enrollment projections for this year and the actual enrollment at a few schools, including Hillcrest, Deerfield, Woodlawn and Cordley elementary schools, Engelebrick estimated. If that’s the case, he suspects it’ll be because former Pinckney students opted to transfer to different schools than projected when the district closed their school.
Here’s the tentative timeline for RSP’s process from the meeting agenda:
BoundaryProcess_Lawrence_072023Board Past President Shannon Kimball asked about a new kind of capacity analysis that Kansas school districts must complete this year to determine how many students they can allow to transfer in under the state’s new open enrollment law.
Englebrick said the district could objectively complete that work internally, but the product would be better if it’s completed by a consultant.
“Could we do this in house? Yes,” Englebrick said. “But I think the consultant brings extremely valuable expertise to this in their ability to focus in on the things that we’ll just miss.”
The board on Monday discussed the contract as a “new business” item, but it had originally been placed on the meeting’s consent agenda — a list of items that are considered altogether with one vote, unless a board member or the superintendent asks to pull an item for discussion.
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Maya Hodison (she/her), equity reporter, can be reached at mhodison (at) lawrencekstimes (dot) com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
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