FCPS Closings/Who to contact about this issue/What can we do as parents to solve this problem

[Anonymous]

I disagree. I have no problem with a big school provided facilities are adequate. I find your proposed bright line rule to be extremely simplistic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:FCPS should have a cutoff where once an elementary school reaches 900 children, it needs to undergo a boundary study and be split up.

It has guidelines, but they are only guidelines.

[Anonymous]

So I know this doesn't help with closings per se, but back on about page 2 or 3, I suggested one small thing they could do to show they are making some efforts is to deploy a "Where's My School Bus App" - I think back to January 6th when busses were late, in accidents, stuck for hours and think how helpful it would be to parents and kids who could check the app and see when their bus would be there, if it made it to school, etc.

I reached out to a school board member who I knew would be a good advocate. He's actually been pushing for it for a couple of years himself. And I spoke with local civic hacking group. Code for Boston deployed this app already, which means the first step of building it is done. Security is built in, requiring registration with student ID, etc. Code for Raleigh is now taking the app Boston built and using the Raleigh school bus GPS data to deploy their own version.

I've shared all this information with FCPS Office of Safety and Security. They are falling back on the old cost & security concerns to say it can't be done right now. But they really should not be concerns. FCPS already has the ability to track busses at their central transportation office. They just need to open the data to these civic hacking groups. They work
with local governments all the time to open up their data, in secure ways, to the public. It doesn't require releasing an RFP and spending a lot of money.

In my line of work, I'm used to the line of reasoning they're using. But it's annoying when it can clearly be demonstrated that other groups have figured this out. I even offered to connect the appropriate FCPS staff with the Code for NoVa group which can better explain how they work, demonstrate how they secure the data and access to the app, etc.

I think my next step will be to start hitting them up on Twitter and FB so that others will see and put a little pressure on them.