What's the cost of new CPCC high schools?

Update: CMS has now posted applications that include budgets of $5.2 million for the first five years for each new school. That includes the value of tuition-free college courses the students are expected to take.  See the Harper proposal here and the Levine proposal here.

The school board is scheduled to vote tonight on creating two new "middle college" high schools on Central Piedmont Community College campuses.

But do members know how much money they're signing off to spend?  Under "fiscal implications,"  the agenda lists modular classrooms,  textbooks, principal and faculty.  But there are no dollar amounts.

Maybe I'm being picky here,  but I didn't think  "fiscal implications"  was supposed to be a yes-or-no question.  I thought the point was to disclose and discuss how much public money is at stake.

When Heath Morrison was hired to lead Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools last summer,  he promised transparency.  When the board held a retreat last September,  most members said they had done a poor job of examining all the implications of their decisions and vowed to do better.

So what's up with the new small schools on the Levine and Harper campuses?  Is the board going to approve applications for the state's cooperative innovative high school program without knowing how much it costs to launch these schools?  Or is CMS withholding the information from the public?

On Friday and again on Monday, I emailed Board Chair Mary McCray,  Deputy Superintendent Ann Clark and Communication Chief Kathryn Block to ask about the cost and why it's not on the agenda.  Monday evening I got this explanation from Clark, still without specifics:  "The costs  associated with this program are funded from the local career technical education budget to cover textbooks and bus passes. Staffing is assigned based on the number of students and the state pays for a principal as long as the student count exceeds 100 students."

Morrison has been talking about expanding the middle college model for some time.  There are good reasons for cloning the approach that debuted with Cato Middle College High in 2007. But I have yet to hear the board conduct an in-depth public discussion of the pros,  cons,  costs and benefits of creating two more school that will serve about 200 juniors and seniors each.  Maybe they've held those talks privately,  or maybe it happened in a public forum I missed.  It seems like the kind of thing taxpayers,  employees and families might want to hear.