Hawaii 2011 - Education
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Voyager charter school students Darius Chaffin and |
True cost of public education?
The Department of Education drastically underestimates the amount spent on public school students each year, says Randy Roth, a University of Hawaii law professor and one of the authors of the landmark Broken Trust essay.
The DOE’s estimate is $11,060 per public school student per year, but Roth says the DOE’s estimate leaves out many costs and that the real figure is almost $16,000. (Both estimates exclude charter schools and their students.)
Using the most recent figures available in his calculations, Roth arrives at his figure by including:
• $1.724 billion in the Department of Education budget;
• $200 million in annual capital improvement spending on schools;
• $350 million in debt service; and
• $450 million in fringe benefits for staff and teachers.
The total comes to $2.724 billion spent on 170,500 students in the regular public schools last year.
Roth says $16,000 is the true per-pupil cost, and should help the community judge whether charter-school funding is fair, and allows a comparison with the cost of a private school education.
Click to enlarge image.
Click to enlarge image.
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Honolulu Community College Associate Professor of Welding |
High-tech training for Hawaii is spelled P-C-A-T-T
Over the past decade, the Pacific Center for Advanced Technology Training has trained 17,000 Hawaii workers in the advanced technical skills required by cutting-edge projects.
“We look at what technology is on the leading edge and we adopt it here at PCATT,” says director Scott Murakami. “There’s a long laundry list of the new technology we’ve brought into the state.”
The list includes:
• Rapid prototyping to allow construction of 3-D computer-assisted design models (CAD);
• Reverse engineering and 3-D scanning to create digital files to rebuild parts for airplanes and ships;
• A virtual welding system to speed up training of new workers and retool the skills of existing workers.
PCATT – a consortium of the University of Hawaii’s seven community colleges, based at Honolulu Community College – is a partnership of the federal and state governments, and private companies.
Some major PCATT projects:
• Partnering with Siemens Corp. on a $327 million software-licensing and support project that’s providing high-end engineering tools to improve efficiency at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. The new efficiencies could primarily affect maintenance for Virginia-class submarines, the most advanced in the U.S. fleet.
• Developing a national curriculum to train technicians in maintaining smart-grid technology using Internet protocol.
• Developing curriculum for IP version 6 – the next generation of Internet protocol – so working professionals can take IPv6 courses.
• Utilizing a $130,000 grant to improve the skills of 50 Hawaii welders from private shipyards so they can earn Navy certification to work on guided-missile-cruiser conversions.
• Training 180 civilian employees at Pearl Harbor in fiber-optic-cable networks so they can work on Virginia-class submarines.
More Info
Go to pcatt.org
845-9296
pcatt@hawaii.edu
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