Hugh's Worthless Blog

Since I work for a large employer who provides us with our healthcare, I do not need to look up the premiums for what it would cost us under the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") for health insurance through the new federal healthcare marketplace. However that information is now available online at www.healthcare.gov for the 34 states whose marketplaces are being run by the federal government (my state of Missouri is included.) The site has been incredibly loaded since October 1 when the plans were first released, but they do provide a spreadsheet with all the premiums for every county in those 34 states. But that spreadsheet has almost 80,000 records which is a lot for Excel or LibreOffice Calc to digest, so I have decided to create my own little Affordable Care Act premium web application to make it easier for people to find the information for any county in the 34 states. Just select your state and your county and it lists all the options in a very plain web page t...

Today stltoday.com (i.e. the Post-Dispatch) had a very informative article posted about the new Missouri standards from the Department of Elementary & Seconary Education for rating the performance of schools. The new system (called the MSIP5 )  uses a 140 point system to rate all the school districts to determine how well they are doing. The Post article lists all the schools in a big chart that could be sorted either alphabetically or by percentage, but you truly cannot see the big picture without charting them all out like I did above. A similar article on KMOX contained hardly any data at all. In reality the vast majority of the school districts are doing a fine job with 43 out of 53 fulfilling 80% of the requirements and 47 out of 53 fulfilling 70% of the requirements. There are only six districts not meeting at least 70% of the state goals. Three of those are very close, Ferguson-Florissant at 69.3%, University City at 66.8% and Jennings at 65.7%. To meet 70% (the lev...

Now that the vast majority of the students who wanted to transfer out of the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens are preparing to start school in new districts, I thought the insanity would start to die down. But I was mistaken! Not just one, but two organizations are helping parents file suit against both the Mehlville and the Kirkwood school districts for not allowing their children to attend there. The NAACP is filing suit against both Mehlville and Kirkwood, and the CEAM  is just filing against Mehlville . Does anybody really think Mehlville and Kirkwood did anything maliciously wrong trying to limit how many students could enroll in their districts? I thought trying to limit class sizes to state recommended ratios was a good thing! The outcome here is making Normandy appear like the brilliant district now by picking a "free transportation" district large enough and far enough away so that the supply of available slots was greater than the demand for the slo...

After Mehlville voiced concerns about having  only enough space for 150 of all the transfer students from Riverview Gardens who wanted to attend there, I was curious where RG would choose as their second choice district. Now they even had some solid numbers to know where their students preferred to attend. If they had been looking out for their own students they would have selected a district already picked by a large number of their students like Ferguson-Florissant (200*), Hazelwood (149*) or Pattonville (60*), so that those students could have buses to ride there and not have to be driven every morning and afternoon. But instead they selected the Kirkwood school district , a choice picked by only 13 of their students. Plus Kirkwood is a smaller district with only one high school who has already stated they can only take in about 100 additional students . This choice makes almost no sense at all, unless Riverview Gardens is just trying to save money and deter as many studen...

Today the stltoday site had an article that gave the latest tallies of where all the students from Normandy and Riverview Gardens want to transfer throughout the St. Louis and St. Charles county school districts, with a very detailed spreadsheet in a PDF . I found all of the numbers pretty interesting. I found it quite interesting how different the choices and numbers were for the two unaccredited districts, and I made a pretty graph from the numbers as well (sorted by total number of transfers, combining Normandy and RG numbers). Both districts had Clayton as their third most popular choice, but with 139 total requests there (96 for Normandy and 43 for RG) that is equivalent to 5.6% of the students for Clayton's district of 2,500 students. The other districts selected varied substantially. Nearby Ritenour, for example, is the second most popular district in Normandy with 122 transfer requests, but only 7 from Riverview. Hazelwood is almost exactly the reverse with 113 from ...

As a resident of the mid-county area I was initially pretty excited about the idea of having a " South County Connector " route to connect mid-county to South County. I had always wondered why I-170 abruptly ended at highway 64/40 and why there was no better way to drive down to Webster Groves and on south to South County without just taking smaller roads. So, yes, in concept creating a "South County Connector" sounded like a great idea. And then I saw the plans. The plan by the county is to build about 2 miles of two lane divided roadway (not a real highway) starting at Hanley south of Manchester and continuing on to River Des Peres Blvd near Watson. And as at a cost of $110 million, that seems a lot of money for not much "connector". That means all that traffic would still have to go through the Hanley/64 interchange of lights, then hit the many lights on Hanley and the traffic all the way down to Manchester. I am not sure exactly how this little b...

Photo from stltoday article Last night Francis Howell hosted a board meeting to address concerns about the potential transfers from Normandy, and 2,500 people showed up . Wow, that is as big of a crowd as the entire enrolled population of the Clayton School district! Francis Howell is a large district with about 17,000 students, but I was duly impressed with that huge of a turnout. It is interesting that when Normandy or Riverview Gardens have meetings to discuss the transfers a few hundred residents show up, but at Francis Howell it draws thousands. I was also interested to hear FHSD may accept up to 600 transfer students from Normandy which is substantially more than I was expecting would fill their capacity. That amounts to almost 4% of their current enrollment, or 1 or 2 students in a class of 20 to 25. It sounds like Mehlville has much less extra room for transfers , and I doubt their number will be nearly that high. It appears that Normandy is trying to convince parents to...

Last night the Riverview Gardens School District gathered to select which district it would provide paid transportation for its outgoing transfer students, and it selected Mehlville down in South St. Louis County. It may also be about 20 miles away from the district (like Francis Howell is from Normandy ), but Mehlville wins the "lower cost" battle since its average cost per student there was only $8,356 per student compared to $9,830 in Francis Howell . So Riverview Gardens saved $1,500 per student in annual cost per transported student over Normandy. Of course, parents would first have to actually volunteer to send their children down there to Mehlville, and the bus trip down there will be even worse than the trip to Francis Howell. There is no direct highway route from Riverview Gardens to Mehlville unless you loop all the way around highway 270. That is pretty insane. The other interesting numbers I saw in the stltoday.com article were the numbers of trans...

The latest saga in the transfer of students from unaccredited to accredited districts is the announcement that Normandy has decided to pay for transportation of their students only to the Francis Howell school district . No, not Hazelwood, University City, Parkway or Pattonville, but far across the Missouri River to Francis Howell. Granted Francis Howell is a larger district which can better handle an influx of incoming students, but that is quite a distance and with Francis Howell starting classes at an early August 8, that gives the schools and the parents little time to prepare. Ironically classes start on August 19 in Normandy, so the transfer students will start 11 days earlier than their neighbors who stay behind. I am curious if one of the reasons why Normandy picked Francis Howell was because it was a top performing district where the per student cost is not as high as most of the St. Louis County schools. If you look on the DESE site you can see where the average studen...

It is going to be very interesting to see how everything plays out this fall for all the school districts in St. Louis County following the ruling of Breitenfeld vs. The School District of Clayton . Essentially now anyone with children in the Riverview Gardens or Normandy School Districts can request to have their children attend any other school anywhere else in St. Louis County. This could be a huge mess if a large number of the 10,000 students in the two districts decide to transfer, with funds having to be transferred from the two unaccredited districts to the hosting districts, and then students being shuttled all over the place, also at the expense of those two failing districts. The southern corner of the Normandy district is actually not too far from Clayton too. That would be a steal to be able to purchase an inexpensive home in Normandy and then be able to send your children to Clayton schools , when folks just a block or two away in University City could not. I know our...

One of the more popular calculations on my website has absolutely nothing to do with mortgages or taxes , but with something that effects everybody -- blood cholesterol levels and ratios. My original cholesterol calculator just calculated the missing factor of HDL, LDL, Triglycerides and total cholesterol and calculated a few ratios. Then I created a second version that used the more internationally accepted SI units used around the world (and the corresponding ratios.) Now someone e-mailed me asking for an updated version that did not force the calculation of a missing variable and used LDL over HDL (instead of HDL over LDL), so I thought that would be yet another new version of my cholesterol ratio calculator. So now you must enter all 4 values and it will calculate the ratios and tell you how your numbers and ratios follow the desired guidelines for blood cholesterol numbers. Thank you, Dr. Tim!