On September 30th, the County did a final head count of their student population only to discover that any supposed ‘savings’ based on Chairman Stewart’s and Supervisor Stirrup’s ‘Immigration Resolution’ will be neglible AND now because of that miscalculation we are short millions of dollars in our school budget!
Update: According to the School system, they will be able to adjust their budget and all students will continue to receive the same level of services.
Here are the numbers from the Prince William County Schools.
Per your request, here’s the ESOL information from our Sept. 30, 2008 student enrollment count of 73,657:
English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) 14.8% funded [ie receiving direct instruction]; 17.8% Total ESOL
Regarding the English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) student enrollment: Total School Division enrollment increased from Sept 30, 2007 to Sept 30, 2008 by 1,003 students for a revised total of 73,657 (336 over projection). During the same period, total ESOL student enrollment decreased from 13,409 to 13,130 or 279 students. Please note that the number of ESOL students classified in a “monitor” status and whom are monitored, but otherwise do not receive direct services decreased from 2,203 to 2,201 for a reduction of 2 students. The number of ESOL students receiving direct instructional services decreased from 11,206 to 10,929 for a decrease of 277 students.
However, it is important to note that during the FY 2009 budget process, the School Division base budget was reduced to reflect the decreases in student enrollment (and associated costs), including students receiving ESOL services, that were realized during the last school year. The September 30, 2008 actual enrollment for ESOL of 13,130, is 527 students greater than the 12,603 students included in the FY 2009 Approved Budget. The number of ESOL students receiving direct instructional services increased from 10,400 to 10,929 for an increase of 529 students. The School Division must now address the additional cost of these 529 ESOL students, without a commensurate increase in County funding.
Please contact me if I can be of additional assistance.
Note: The emphasis in the last paragraph is mine and did not come from the County.
Would the shortage be $5 million, 700 students equaled $7 million saving then 529 students would be a $5.29 million deficit, right?
Alanna, am I correct in my understanding that PWC officials (particularly Corey, Stirrup, etc.) assumed that (1) the “Rule of Law Resolution” (ROLR) would cause an exodus of Spanish-speaking families and therefore have the effect of decreasing ESOL enrollment in PWC schools, and therefore (2) that would translate into a savings in school expenditure, ultimately (3) justifying the cost of ROLR?
By the way, I assume most of the enrollees in ESOL programs are Spanish-speaking kids. And since much discussion on anti-BVBL has been in relation to PWC’s Hispanic/Latino population, could someone tell me what locales in Prince William County have the highest concentrations of Hispanic/Latino residents?
Robb,
You are 100% correct in that assumption. However, now their projections have not lived up to their expectations and their ‘savings’ as a result of the resolution are rapidly vanishing leaving us with a net negative financial impact.
Also, in terms of areas with the highest concentration of Hispanic residents, that would be Woodbridge and Manassas. If you would like a further breakdown, I can investigate further.
Okay, so let me be sure I understand this.
Other than to satisfy a small group of racists, the primary justification given to us by Chairman Letiecq, Co-Chairman Stewart, and Supervisors Stirrup for the “Immigration Resolution” was a savings of 7 million dollars because the ugliness and scare tactics would chase away ESOL students by chasing away their parents who are probably undocumented but we don’t know for sure.
Hmmmm.
After the Resolution was put in place, Letiecq, Stewart, and Stirrup bragged that our ESOL enrollment was PROJECTED to be down from last year, while neighboring counties had a rise in ESOL student numbers. And, they snickered about how Fairfax County in particular would have school budget deficits as a result while wonderful PWC would see a cost savings.
N O W ! It turns out the projections were wrong (I wonder why). Prince William County also saw a rise in ESOL enrollment this year, in spite of the unduly celebrated “Immigration Resolution” and CONTRARY to the ran-the-mouth-way-to-fast-trying-to-brag-and-cover-their-asses SPIN of Corey Stewart/Greg Letiecq/John Stirrup!!!!!!
But, because of the false projections (wonder why they were falsified, an honest mistake) we haven’t budgeted enough money for our schools, something we used to take pride in funding generously. Instead of the 7 million dollar savings that was bragged about foolishly, we’re facing a 5 million dollar deficit????!!!!!
Nice one boys.
But let’s not forget, their other glorious justification for the Immigration Resolution was that crime numbers went down. Unlike the ESOL debacle, this is not a miscalculation; it’s a flat out lie.
Chairman Letiecq, Co-Chairman Stewart, and John Stirrup have only two tricks left in their bag when it comes to defending the failed and very costly Immigration Resolution. They can either flat out LIE about crime statistics, or they can flat out LIE about ESOL enrollment (and pretend they didn’t get the memo).
At a certain point, the disgrace should be theirs and theirs alone. It isn’t fair to spread it to PWC.
Rob, the highest concentration in Woodbridge is along the Rt. one corridor. On the east side, it tends to be the streets off of Featherstone Road and East Longview Drive and to the west, the area is off of West Longview Drive and off of the Hylton Ave neighborhood.
In Manassas, the Hispanic population has clustered around the Rt. 234 corridor, in the Irongate and Sudley Communities.
In our area, these are typically the first place new people enter into. I have been around long enough to remember when East and West Longview were working class whites in their first homes, then the East Longview area (particulary the Bayside appartments) went to African American and then in the early 90’s almost all Hispanic.
This is not a complete surprise. Remember in 2007, there was never any substantiation of the hyperbolic claims that Stewart and Letiecq made about an invasion of “illegals.” To this day we don’t know if there were a lot of undocumented people in PWC before the Resolution, or if there were just a lot of Hispanics.
Then in 2008 comes the alarmingly telling Immigration Report from the Police Department that showed that over the first six months of enforcement of the Immigration Resolution, only 1.7 percent of the crime committed in PWC involves undocumented persons.
That meant one of two things:
1) Either the population of undocumented persons in the county was much less than it had been portrayed by Stewart, Stirrup, and Letiecq and we’d put the county through hell for no ostensible reason.
2) Or, there had been a massive exodus of undocumented persons and thus there was no one left in the county to commit any crimes (and if statistics had been kept prior to the Resolution, the 1.7 percent would have been higher).
Since Corey Stewart preferred explanation #2, my inclination was to assume #1 was true. Now it’s been proven.
If indeed the Immigration Resolution had caused an exodus, then these ESOL numbers would have gone down as Stewart hoped they would, not up as they did.
The ESOL numbers went up. So let’s return to explanation #1. The number of undocumented persons in PWC was never as high as Stewart, Letiecq, and Stirrup claimed. What we had in 2007 was a small mob of frightened and misinformed people making assumptions about their neighbors, about the people behind the counter at fast food restaurants, about their child’s classmates, all based on skin color and language proficiency. Such assumptions involve prejudice. Of this there can be no doubt. But more importantly, we must ask ourselves if such assumptions are just cause for radical changes in county policy, radical reshuffling of our strategic goals and budget allocations, and the trampling of our county’s reputation and prospects for economic recovery.
If such assumptions are NOT just cause, then we must hold accountable those who bullied, frightened, and misled us into taking this tragic and ill-conceived path.
I’ll be the first to say it: Corey Stewart and John Stirrup should resign.
SOOO glad for the documentation on this. One more proof that Stewart, Stirrup, GL and his CLAN are liars.
Incidentally, Lucky, let’s not forget the ESOL students are not just Hispanic! My goodness, the eclectic mix we have in this county would blow your mind!
I have never understood this hate and blame over ESOL. Corey Stewart has proudly stated that his children speak Swedish and benefited from ESOL. I don’t understand how this became the marker for something negative in this county. Now we are worried about the budget? Isn’t ESOL funded by the state budget? I thought it was. And anyway, if the county pays, well it should pay. I thought it was supposed to be bad if not everyone can speak English. What’s going on in Prince William County???
Kgotthardt, I did not say anything about ESOL students. I was following up on Alanna’s answer to Rob Pearson about the location of most of the Hispanic population. I have never commented on ESOL.
Witness Too,
Actually it’s funded by the County, State & the Feds. From what I understand the County’s portion is about half and was determined during the last budget cycle based on the projections. So, this miscalculation obviously will have to be funded somehow, I am just not sure how.
How will this be handled? Is this out of the ordinary that they miss their projections by this amount?
Great question Kathy, where are we going to get the money for this shortfall? Isn’t there a contingency fund? We can’t let our schools be underfunded. Maureen Caddigan would never stand for it!
And also I agree with WHWN, this should be the last straw for Stewart and Stirrup. What are they going to blame this one on? Or, who would be the better question. The sand castle is crumbling around them.
Standby for the ESOL budget numbers…
I’m sick of paying for this
and I’m going to fight not to.
Rick,
Are you planning on Plyler vs. Does being overturned anytime soon? That’s the ONLY way you will NOT be paying for ESOL.
As indicated in the excerpt above, the school division will have to make up the shortfall without a commensurate increase in County funding. This means the schools will have to move money around within their budget to make up the difference.
Though we do receive revenue from the federal and state governments for ESOL, it appears we are paying about 2/3 of the program ourselves (not uncommon).
For fiscal year 2009, the projected revenue from the state for ESOL was $9,183,195.
For fiscal year 2009, the projected revenue from the feds for ESOL was $1,476,556.
This adds up to $10,659,751 in federal and state revenues.
The entire budget for ESOL programming, however, is $30,035,379 (for the approved fiscal year 2009 budget). After the ~10 million from the state and feds, it appears we are paying the rest from the County transfer.
Okay, Rick. We’ll send all the diplomat’s kids home. Heck, we’ll get rid of anyone who can’t read, write or speak standard business Engish! The colleges will be empty. The STREETS will be empty. It’ll be great. We can just eliminate schools, town and cities all together.
Greetings all. I thought I would drop by for a good laugh. I said all last spring on the black velvet blog that hispanic students weren’t leaving in droves and that I was dipsticking 3 schools. I was practically called a liar.
I want to see all the money the black velvets keep telling everyone about. Where is the savings? It looks like some folks believed the magic kool aid. Too bad that a good spin is often more important than the truth.
What will happen with the extra kids? Same thing that is happening everywhere. Stuff them in. Overcrowding will prevail.
But no HSM, there is no significant savings. It was all bullshit and blather and an attempt to manipulate the facts by your leaders.
The HSM followers must be angry that they were lied to. But we all should be angry, because some of us let this all happen without protest thinking there was a chance that what Greg Letiecq and Corey Stewart was saying was honest and forthright.
We all got scammed on this one.
Fear Not, thanks for the clarification. So I guess $20,000,000 will have to be shifted from other parts of our school budget but where from exactly?
Why can’t we take it from our contingency fund (or whatever its called)?
By “our” contingency fund, do you mean the schools or the county? I wouldn’t expect the county to transfer additional funds over to cover these costs. Whether the schools choose to use any of their money in reserves would be up to them. I would note that there will be a lot of shortfalls we can anticipate this year and at least next year, though, so the competition for any funds will be tight, and the incentive to hold on to money “just in case it gets even worse” will be another strong contender.
Yeah, if the second Great Depression is coming we should save our money and just let the schools make due. Everything else in this county will be percieved to be going down hill as long as Corey Stewart is still our mascot.
I hope someone is going to follow Greg and Corey around and say ‘Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire’ every time one of them trumpets that they reduced ESOL numbers. Any change in actual numbers is insignifcant.
The county school system heard Corey Stewart’s bellicosity about how many ‘illegals’ had been run off, based on ESOL numbers, and adjusted their numbers accordingly. I mean if you can’t trust the chairman of the board of county supervisors…..who can you trust? So now there are almost 600 unfunded ESOL students. Who pays? We pay, eventually. Squeeze them on in.
So, the bottom line is, Corey and Greg haven’t saved PWC any money and if they try to spin it to say they have, then they are liars.
That’s the mistake people make when they listen to Greg and Corey and when they attempt to quantify the number of illegal immigrants using ESOL as a measuring tool. ESOL kids can be from anywhere and certainly within status.
BVBL Reports – Nothing, not a word on the issue. How’s that? Cat got his tongue or what?
Moon-Howler, how do you know that Greg and Corey lying rhetoric impacted decisions by the school system? If so that would be a tragedy. It was clear a year ago that nothing the two of them said about immigration was intended to be accurate in any way. It was all demagoguery all the time. Anyone who bases their decisions on demagoguery should be fired.
What I’d like to know is this: did Corey Stewart use his power to influence these numbers for political purposes?
The school officials should be held accountable for this. Were they fooled? Are they incompetent? Were they negligent? Or did Corey lean on them so he’d have something to brag about on the Anti-immigrant press junket?
Corey cannot lean on them. School boards are independent of the bocs. They only thing they rely on is funding.
How on earth could anyone in the school system be held responsible? I do not know how projections and staffing planning are done. I expect there are formulas and other indicators. However, how would you like to be the chump who over estimates? Political talk, newspapers, statements by community leaders have to be taken into account, if only subliminally.
And no I dont know that Greg and Corey lying impacted the decisions made by the school system, only because I do not know how the school system made those decisions. However, they do not exist in a vacuum. I know what was said in on the blogs and I know what was said in all the newspapers. Do you think that school officials totally ignored these statements? I don’t think so but I do not KNOW so.
Finally, I doubt if the money from the bocs to the school sytem would have been different. Perhaps the school board would have allocated differently if they had had a closer vision of the number of students.
The important issue is that elected officials simply said something existed that wasn’t so and some of them perpetuated a myth.
I agree that we can’t blame the school system for this. They were obviously influenced by the Brown Scare mythology. We all were. The sad thing is that these people were making policy decisions based on the Brown Scare mythology, while the rest of us were deciding to steer clear of Potomac Mills. Small price to pay for Potomac Mills. Big price to pay for our school system.
School projections are rarely if ever exact. I am not sure how it is done. All sorts of data is plugged in to the ‘projection equation.’ Local data in mixed with formula information (like how many kids per household in a 5 bedroom house in a community similar to one in Gainesville) and the local people come up with numbers. Trends are also used.
Life will go on with the unfunded ESOL kids. Times are tight and adjustments will be made. Corey and Greg and some clown who always drops misinformation in the local papers just need to stop giving out incorrect data.
Projections are not an exact science and being 1006 off is pretty darn good if you ask me, given our recent housing situation. I think PWCS staff is to be commended for hitting it as closely as they did.
My observation has been that county employees, from the police department to the county exec’s office to the schools and public services have done a tremendous job coping with the inept and self-serving leadership of Chairman Stewart.
In this case we can’t blame school officials for being undermined by the Anti-immigrant Lobby’s (Corey Stewart’s) agenda. Our entire county government is going to be saboutaged by the Corey Stewart/anti-immigrant agenda until he either leaves office or realizes there is no longer a political advantage to hate-mongering.
At least now we know for certain that the lies they told about ESOL were lies. We should not be fooled the next time when the tell us immigrants are costing us money at the parks and libraries, at the hospitals, or in public services. Once and for all: the communities that Letiecq, Stirrup, amd Stewart have targeted contribute a great deal more to our county than they receive in return. This is especially true because for more than a year these three imposters have targeted our friends and neighbors for hatred and scapegoating, based on false data and false conclusions, all in the name of electoral politics.
Dis. Gist. Ting.
God, I feel bad for the employees who have to deal directly with Stewart and Stirrup’s screw ups! I mean, we’ve ALL had bosses like that, right? And how fun was THAT?
In return for their hard work and invaluable contributions we have told them they are unwelcome and focused on their children as unwanted burdeons, based solely on the eye’s ability to separate “their children” from “our children.”
They are ALL our children, and to argue otherwise by counting the “brown faces” at the bus stop is beneath the ideals on which our bation was founded.
Oops. “nation” not “bation” !!!
Oh okay. I thought you were trying to say “bastion.”
P as P, have you talked to some of these county employees? They are mortified, frustrated, and demoralized by Corey Stewart’s leadership. He makes their jobs so much more difficult. The only positive thing Corey Stewart’s anti-immigrant agenda has brought our county employees is countless overtime hours. Fatter paychecks at taxpayer expense, but this is well worth it because they are cleaning up after the Duecaster Disaster in real time minimizing the damage on a daily basis.
The good news is that School Boards in Virginia are elected positions and they owe the boards of supervisors nothing. It is up to the BOCS to fund the school boards.
Stewart, much as he might like to bully the school board, cannot do it. Mr. Milton Johns is the chairman of the school board and functions quite independently, I hope, from Corey Stewart.
It has been my experience that the school board members have the interest of ALL children at heart and do not use their position as a political spring board.
Many county positions do not get paid overtime. Those folks just have to put in their time to get the job done, whether it is an 8 hour day or a 16 hour day. Such is the nature of many salaried positions.
That’s awful that county employees have to do all this work to clean up after Corey Stewart and don’t get paid overtime. We should have a special law enacted while Corey is still here, called the Corey Stewart Calamity Compensation Act.
County Executive’s office employees and police department employees got overtime. This is just one of the many ways the Immigration Resolution cost taxpayers millions of dollars when we could least afford it. But in this case, we couldn’t have afforded NOT to pay the overtime. Otherwise Stewart and Stirrup would have done even more damage to our bottom line and our public safety.
Did ALL employees get paid overtime? Many of the higher level jobs in most county positions do not get paid overtime. Example, does the chief get overtime? Does Gerhart get overtime? I seriously doubt it.
10 pm
Still waiting to see Greg or Corey pony up with the right numbers. Where are those 700 missing ESOL students that are supposed to be saving us all those mega bucks?
Where are all the blow hard minions who have parroted Greg and Corey on this issue? I am listening. The rest of us want to know just what happened to all that money we are saving from purging all the ‘illegals’ from the county schools.
MH, FOIA it.
I know it costs the county money, but we need to know this.
PAP, They will just tell you if you call. It is a personnel matter and a matter of public record if people get paid overtime.
I think it’s better to get things in writing. Then you can put there HERE. 🙂
And I wouldn’t do that…so no need for me to get it in writing. I find that trust gets me a lot further than holding feet to the fire. People I talk to know that I will not quote them without their permission and that information gathered will used in a way that does not put them out there in the public eye.
Not saying others are wrong, and sometimes it is necessary to do that. However, I prefer my way when possible.
TRUST? WOW. I’m curious how you can trust ANYONE in government right now. The BOCS has made it so the entire county has to cough up information because what we get from Corey and Company is BO-GUS.
Furthermore, if you don’t publish the information you DO get, how is anyone supposed to believe what you are saying is true? People want evidence. Otherwise, they will just say things like, “You don’t know what you are talking about” or “You just have a vendetta.”
You can tell them you are going to quote them on a blog. That’s what I do. I even told Corey that the one time he wrote to me on something…I forget what. Besides, FOIA information is just that….FOIA. Why NOT publish it?
PAP
I meant them trusting me. If people want evidence, they can call and get their own information.
A FOIA is expensive. It could involve thousands of emails and pieces of correspondence. I would not do a FOIA willy-nilly because of the expense.
When people are pulled off their regular work to answer a FOIA request, they aren’t getting their own work done. A thousand hours of FOIA related work at say 30 dollars an hours times 3 people gets pretty expensive. And the county should be charging people for copies. I am not sure if it is or not.
If something is a matter of county policy, you should be provided this information without a FOIA request. If you want specific information about exchanges between people, well, there is no other way to get it.
So meanwhile, I will try the most conservative approach that costs both the county and me less money.