WEST DOVER — I was surprised to receive an email recently from the Task Force on the Implementation of the Pupil Weighting Factors Report announcing a delay in releasing their proposal and data to back it up.
This came as a surprise because, for the better part of two years, it was known that the simulator provided to the Agency of Education as part of the report would need to be updated with the final Act 46 merged districts and FY2019–2021 data.
No one would have thought a task force that runs from June 2021 to Dec. 15, 2021 would still need to do that work as we approach the beginning of November, when that data would be necessary to make informed decisions while creating their proposal.
Yet here we find ourselves. Oct. 29 was the second and final scheduled public hearing, but we had no updated simulator, no updated results from the report, and only one piece of a much larger, and apparently ground-shifting, proposal.
In the name of transparency and citizen participation in our government, would it not make sense to hold a third public hearing so the public could comment on the task force's recommendations?
After all, in the words of the co-chairs themselves, “these decisions will impact the education of students statewide.”