Weakening the diversity policy

Hot water in lavatories is not required for sanitation purposes.   Adding it introduces other issues --- it increases energy costs, and adds a requirement to make sure you have adequate tempering in place to make sure that no children are scalded by hot water.

"Say that a school can hold 300 kids on a traditional calendar.  That same school could hold 400 kids on YR."

Everyone loves to keep on passing out as a truism the statement that "MYR schools can hold 25% more capacity, so that we need to building only 3 schools instead of 4.

In practice, that has not been true.  I will posit that it will NEVER be true of MYR.

To achieve this 25% in additional capacity figure, you would need to have all planned tracks fully utilized at every grade level.  To expect that to happen based upon the mix of kids assigned via mandatory base assignments is ludicrous.  If you relied on VOLUNTARY applications so that  you could pick and choose among applicants based upon needing to fill certain tracks on certain grade levels, perhaps you could approach that utilization level ---- but, for this to work, you would have to plan on refusing assignments to a lot of kids in order to have a large enough pool of applicants to choose from to fill holes where needed.

Seriously, look at the recent applications to DPI (that have been denied) to try to get exemptions for larger class sizes.  This, I think, is the biggest problem with MYR.  In a traditional calendar school, when you start to have too many kids at a grade level, you can choose between maybe 5 or 6 classes to add one more kid to.  When they've all reached the tipping point, you then organize a new class, pulling maybe 4 or 5 kids from each classroom.  So what happens in MYR?  If you get past the tipping point size for all the classes in one grade level, what are your choices?  Do you pull kids from classes on each track, thus forcing 3/4 of the kids to face the disruption of a track change during the school year?  Would that even be legal, since this could place some kids in the position of being able to attend fewer than 180 days in the school year?  Or, do you end up having to reorganize and form new classes for more than one track?  If so, there goes a major portion of your "extra capacity" that MYR was supposed to provide, and you've added the expense of an extra teacher(s) as well.

Does YR have the potential to stretch capacity?  Yes, but nowhere near the THEORETICAL 25% that is continually claimed.  And, keep in mind that the capacity addition will be most efficiently achieved when you are set up to pick and choose applicants to fill open slots in particular grade levels and tracks.

I cede that hitting 100% utilization would be hard to do; grades are not equally dispersed.  So a bubble may exist this year in K, move to 1st grade next year and so on.  Further, the sunk cost of building a school has already occurred in schools that are switched from Trad to YR.  And yes, I think the past assignments often left capacity on the table in order to satisfy diversity.

Now, given that you need to serve 1200 kids, are 4 Trad schools cheaper or are 3 YR schools cheaper? 

that's just it - when MYR schools are operating under-capacity, and often with fewer students than they had when they were traditional - both of which are true for Wake County, then the YR schools are costing more.