The demise of McKinley ES (APS)
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Anonymous
| No one is saying don’t fill schools. They are saying balance them. Just balance it!! |
Anonymous
The +133 seats in the APS zone map that everyone is pointing to is for 2023-24. Reed opens in 2021, right? APS needs to be using the planning unit level projections for 2023-24 to see where the empty seats sit. For all we know, Taylor could end up totally under-enrolled once they open ASFS and Key. You can't look at this stuff in the aggregate, you have to drill down into the specific planning units and figure out which ones are likely to see the growth between now and 2023-24 and make sure you have enough seats in those areas when you will need them. Otherwise, you have to redraw the boundaries again. Which is exactly what we are going to do for middle school boundaries in a few months. This constant boundary drawing and redrawing to correct for poor analysis sucks up an incredible amount of resources. |
Anonymous
NP here - I only moved to Arlington recently, and I'm trying to figure out more about what happened in the past to understand the current fights. Can someone please explain the issues in the 2018 report? |
Anonymous
The only people objecting to that are the #SaveMcKinley folks. Everyone else accepts it because it makes sense. |
Anonymous
If you weren’t here for the 2018 process, it’s not worth rehashing because it’s irrelevant now. |
Anonymous
I don’t think you understand how school capacity works in practice. Capacity numbers assume that every classroom is filled exactly to capacity, which is not how it works in real life. In real life, if you’re over about 94% capacity, there’s a good chance you’ll need trailers. That’s fine if your school can take trailers, but not if you’re at a school like Reed or Fleet that APS has determined cannot take trailers. The more sensible choice is to leave schools like Reed that can’t take trailers at no more than 93-94% capacity because they are effectively full at that point, and then push more students to schools like Tuckahoe and Nottingham that can take trailers. -Nottingham parent who can deal with reality |
Anonymous
Except for the fact that everyone keeps bringing up past mistakes by the county/SB. I am not a McKinley parent, but I keep hearing from various sources that Nottingham mobilized and hurt other schools during the last zoning go round. It would be helpful to know if there's truth to that. |
Anonymous
That is incorrect. Nottingham was suggested as an option school site in the last process. Some Nottingham people got involved and pointed out that 1) the staff’s conclusion was based in part on a typographical error that indicated Nottingham met one of the criteria the staff otherwise stated it didn’t (the staff corrected this error), 2) the staff misapplied another criteria in trying to create an exception just for Nottingham that otherwise was irrelevant to the criteria, solely to justify making Nottingham an option school when it otherwise didn’t qualify (the staff ignored this), and 3) one of the criteria was counter productive to the stated purpose of managing population growth (the SB agreed and had the staff remove that criteria from the analysis for all schools). Even with #2 remaining in place, the staff’s own analysis didn’t support making Nottingham an option school, which was the basis for Nottingham’s further objection. Nottingham never threw other schools under the bus and certainly didn’t hurt other schools, they simply pointed out that the staff’s conclusion was inconsistent with their stated reasoning and data and asked them to either fix their analysis or provide the real basis for the decision. It later came out that the staff had decided on Nottingham at the beginning before analyzing the data and then tried to create a framework and data to justify it, which they screwed up (hence the issues noted above). This called into question the integrity of the entire process, which may have contributed to the SB suspending the process at that time. |
Anonymous
There's always a fight, whether it's moving elementary schools, or shifting HB Woodlawn to Rosslyn. It's called "The Arlington Way". |
Anonymous
| I really wish I had bought North of 66. Everyone below is going to get hosed. |
Anonymous
I seem to remember people below Columbia Pike saying something similar. Drew has some openings, maybe you can look into a transfer? |
Anonymous
I'm a McK parent and I thought it was Tuckahoe that kicked out some PUs and ended up underenrolled while McK was both under construction and at 800. That sucked and was just 3 yrs ago. |
Anonymous
You may be referring to the 2014/15 boundary process, which is separate from the 2018 location review. APS redrew boundaries for NW schools in 2012/13 in preparation for opening Discovery in Fall 2015. When the new projections came out in fall 2014, they showed that rather than capacity usage being balanced among the schools, McKinley was projected to have significant excess capacity after the expansion was complete while other schools, particularly Ashlawn and Nottingham, would be substantially over capacity. The school board started a boundary refinement process to adjust the new boundaries approved in 2013 to better balance capacity after Discovery opened and the McKinley expansion was complete. The staff put forth six potential scenarios, and many community groups, including those from both Nottingham and McKinley, got involved. There was a member of the McKinley community who believed she had found an error in the projections data that overestimated the number of excess seats at McKinley in the future, but the consultants hired by APS to do the projections disputed her methodology. Nottingham jumped on board with the consultants in that fight, because the plan favored by the McKinley folks would have put Nottingham at 120% capacity after Discovery opened if the consultants were right and McKinley was wrong. The end result was that the SB selected the proposal that they believed would best balance capacity, which included moving a planning unit that was at Tuckahoe at the time to McKinley rather than to Nottingham as they expected based on the 2013 decision. At time time, it was believed this plan would put McKinley at about 100.73% capacity in 2016 when the projects would done, and Nottingham at 101.36% capacity. Two things went wrong. First, the McKinley expansion took longer than expected due to unforeseen construction delays (they discovered an underground spring, and some utility lines that weren't properly mapped, and I think a third issue I can't remember), so there were all of these students moved in when the seats weren't ready. Second, the projections used in 2014 were off, and McKinley ended up with more students than anticipated. Nottingham ended up with fewer, but only by a handful of students (I believe they were at 94-96% capacity when Discovery opened in 2015, were back over capacity again by fall 2017, and had trailers the whole time). McKinley ended up in a legitimately lousy situation, but their ire was particularly targeted at Nottingham even though other school groups were just as involved in the refinement process, seemingly because Nottingham was the most vocal on the projections issue and didn't side with McKinley. Personally, I think McKinley got hosed in the whole thing (I don't know that anyone can really dispute that), but I think their anger with Nottingham is misplaced. The consultants were the ones who made the error in the projections, not Nottingham, and if McKinley had been wrong about the numbers, McKinley's preferred scenario would have resulted in Nottingham being at least as overcapacity as McKinley claims is unacceptable now. |
Anonymous
Not exactly. Two of the planning units at issue in the 2014 refinement were then-Tuckahoe units, one slated to move to McKinley and one to Nottingham. Those two units were a particular focus of the 2014 refinement process, particularly whether they both should go to Nottingham, both to McKinley, or split (the final decision was that both would go to Nottingham). No one took issue with Tuckahoe not getting them back during the process itself because Tuckahoe was projected to be at 106% capacity even without them under all of the scenarios. The irony, though, is that when the dust settled, Tuckahoe initially was the most under-capacity of all three schools. |
Anonymous
Clearly, the priorities are causing problems with making boundaries that balance enrollment and maximixe use of each of our buildings. The priorities need to change. |