The transportation department has more flexibility than what you are portraying to deal with changes. These same buses take elementary, high school, and option school kids on their routes. Sure it might be a new bus or buses on the middle school run but doing this at the margins, which is what you’re talking about here, they sort it out. They also do things like add a couple stops to existing routes on buses that are less full. All 3 of my kids have been busers and their routes change year to year and the buses are not even that full typically. |
You don’t understand. The proposal was to move 1/2 of Hamm, almost all walkers, to WMS. |
Apparently Hamm was only accepting 24 transfers this year and there were 70 applicants. Hopefully this shows that it would be possible to fill schools with voluntary transfers. |
A big chunk of those kids were technically in the walk zone, but I have serious doubts that many of those kids walk. It's too far on streets without sidewalks. And many of the kids they were moving to Hamm would have been walkers too (e.g., most of Glebe). |
Have you even been by Hamm after school, kids are ALL OVER walking, for miles beyond the school. What are you talking about, almost every street has sidewalks in DHMS zone. Anyways, we don’t provide bus transport, and when rezoned we will have to. |
Thanks for admitting your argument is made up entirely on your “serious doubts” instead of actual facts. And thanks for admitting you know nothing about Hamm or the neighborhood it’s in. Almost every street has sidewalks, and the kids walk! |
I don't know who you think you're responding to, but I'm a np. |
Hamm isn't the school they need to fill! Williamsburg is. |
Did Williamsburg also fill up their transfer quota? |
I do understand. It wasn't half of Hamm. It was about half of the walk zone, which is different. That was the starting proposal after which the Hamm lobby is going to whittle it down to fewer kids, which APS knew at the time and knows now. I know the storyline is APS staff are completely incompetent but they know exactly how everyone in this community acts and they plan for it and anticipate it. The initial proposals APS puts out are never the final map. |
Would be interesting to know. Williamsburg is seriously under enrolled. At a minimum the School Board should move the straggling Tuckahoe and Nottingham planning units to Williamsburg just to alleviate Swanson, which is too full and on track to get more full. The Williamsburg issue is just going to keep getting worse if they don't do anything. |
I have a kid in the walk zone for Swanson at the far edge. Many people drive them in the morning because of the early start time and then they walk home in the afternoon in decent weather but get picked up after school too. I'm sure it's the same for Hamm. The walk zones for the middle school and high school are really quite big. |
It's a big "walk zone" and I do seriously doubt a lot of the kids are really walking it. I just checked a few locations with Google maps and it's saying it would take 30-35 minutes to walk to Hamm from some locations that APS deems walkable. That's a long way with major streets to cross. I have a kid in the middle of the Hamm walk zone and even her walk is even pretty far (20-25 minutes). Parents in our neighborhood with kids further away typically won't have their kid walk, especially in the morning but often not at all. https://www.apsva.us/wp-content/uploads/sites/57/2023/08/MS_Hamm_SY23_24.pdf |
Then Boulevard Manor and Patrick Henry apartments can move to Swanson, since they go to Yorktown. That solves all the most glaring alignment and capacity issues. And there will then be no need to move Hamm students across Lorcom Lane away from Hamm. But some comprehensive boundary change at all levels will still likely have to happen at some point in time (for all levels) since APS flubbed it a few years ago; the new Tech HS will open to full capacity soon, and Yorktown can’t exceed 2,600 students on that small campus. They should not however move boundaries that were just moved a couple years prior. |
I think Williamsburg only had 10 seats for 6th-grade neighborhood transfers, and there were 50+ on the waitlist. If WMS is so under enrolled, why weren't there more transfer seats available? |