The threat of PARCC

Rockville Centre is a school district that has always had a strong technology program, continuously purchasing new computers for its students to use. But that program could be tested by a new state mandate, the Partnership for Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), which may wind up costing the district millions.

PARCC is one of the latest unfunded mandates to come down from the state, and it’s also one of the largest. It requires additional state tests to measure student progress — 10 state tests per grade each year, requiring more testing days than students currently have.

The tests would be administered online, which means that students would need computers to take them. Due to security concerns, the state could mandate that all students need to take the test at the same time, meaning that the district would have to purchase enough computers for the largest grade levels of students.

“It all depends down the road on whether or not [the state is] serious about merging all of this testing into a collection of exams that are going to be administered on computers,” said Rockville Centre Superintendent Dr. William Johnson. “If that happens, we’re probably looking at a $4 million to $5 million expense on the part of the school district. That could be spread over a number of years, but we don’t have enough computers to administer the tests in the way they’re currently constructed.”

The district always factors new computers into its yearly budget. While the expense includes purchasing new computers, a lot of it goes to replacing ones that are old or malfunctioning, making it hard to increase the number of computers the district has.

“If I have 1,000 computers in the school district now, every year I have to replace maybe 200 of them,” said Johnson. “So you’re looking at a five-year cycle of replacement. And at the same time, trying to get that 1,000 up to 2,000, and at some point 3,500. It’s not going to happen without additional expense.”

The cost of the PARCC mandate could be reduced if the state doesn’t require all students to take the tests at the same time. Right now, the district uses Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) tests, which are conducted on the computer. The NWEA tests give students random questions from a large database of possibilities, making it so that no two students are taking the exact same test.

“What it does, unlike the state, is it allows us a window of two weeks to a month to administer this to kids,” said Johnson. “So we can cycle kids through this. So on a single computer in a month, I can have a dozen kids.”

The NWEA also pays for the tests to be graded, a cost that the state would also pass to school districts under the PARCC mandate.

Rockville Centre would also have to find a way to squeeze in more school days for testing. Only class held between the months of September and June count towards the state-mandated 180 days of class, Johnson said, so extending the year into August or July isn’t really an option.

“We’d have to do away with vacations that we are accustomed to providing in order to get more days in there,” he said. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen. We have 184 days in our calendar, and we struggle sometimes because of where the holidays fall.”

The PARCC mandate could be one of the largest unfunded mandates to ever come down from New York state, costing many districts millions of dollars to update technology.

Johnson is unsure whether or not the PARCC mandate will come through as is, saying he would be surprised if it happens by 2020. But if it does come through, even though Rockville Centre is better prepared than other districts, it would still cost the district a lot in both money and time.

“In terms of actual time away from instruction, I’d say we’re looking at anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the school year being dedicated to testing and test prep,” Johnson said. “It’s outrageous.”