APS elementary planning initiative called off
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Anonymous
I hope they have the courage to make Key neighborhood too. I live in the area you describe and this area should be at ASFS as it's 0.4 mile from my house; while Ashlawn is 1.8 miles away so I'll take my short walk to ASFS. |
Anonymous
| They've learned that neighborhood schools should be the ones with the most capacity b/c they can't turn kids away. They can cap option schools based on the building size, but neighborhood schools are SOL (see McKinley). |
Anonymous
I'm interested to see what they come to the next meeting with for Nancy Van Doren's request for a county wide solution. I don't think it's going to be possible to draw contiguous boundaries, no matter how convoluted, to balance capacity without moving Key. Without creating that capacity in the NE area, they are going to need islands or to send kids from the Glebe, Taylor, and Reed walkzones to schools in the west. There's basically a wall of walkzone boxing in the western schools: https://www.apsva.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/expanded-WZ-current-boundary.pdf |
Anonymous
The problem with that is that NW is also overcrowded and needs more neigborhood seats. If they take what will be by far the largest school in that region as an option school they will actually make the boundaries up there even worse trying to relieve overcrowding. If an option school goes into NW, it has to be one of the smaller schools (but not Nottingham, because that school can take the most trailers to help cope with future overcrowding in the region). |
Anonymous
My bet is the staff will come back with a tentative map for the whole county that's as much of a mess as they can credibly make it to sell everyone (school board and community) on the need to do the location review. Since they'll need more time to do that, they'll only go ahead with the red zone redrawing this fall. |
Anonymous
They aren't going to revisit the decision to make Reed neighborhood. The question is whether another school becomes an option school, and if so, which option? I think they could make a good case for any of them. |
Anonymous
That's kind of a backwards way to look at it because the schools are very differently situated in many of the relevant respects. We shouldn't decide on the school and then make the case to fit it, we should set out our needs and priorities for site selection and then choose the best sites based on that. |
Anonymous
You really think they're that clever? They didn't give up on it because of strategy. SB really is not that bright. They simply did not want to deal with all the angst from parents and school communities who didn't want anything to change. |
Anonymous
No, the issue was the CIP. That blew up in a way no one expected, and since that had a harder and earlier deadline than the location review, they pushed off the location review to deal with the CIP. The only way they could have finished the location review this spring would have been to make a half-assed conclusion based on unfinished analysis (they hadn't even finished incorporating everything the SB asked them to when they called it off). |
Anonymous
In a perfect world, yes. But this is APS. They are trying to clean up a mess. The only reason they're even looking at this quadrant for an option program is because they are projecting an excess of neighborhood seats once Reed comes online, and have no good way to draw boundaries to fill the schools. All the school sites that were discussed as potential places for an option program are equally poor for one reason or another. So, to my mind, they could make an equally poor case for any of them. None make sense for Immersion or for a countywide option since none are centrally located. But, here we are. |
Anonymous
Come on, you can do better than that. Surely you could, at the very least, take a position on whether the schools with the greatest ability to flex their capacity via trailers should be option programs (giving APS the ability to increase program size as demand increases) or neighborhood schools (giving APS the ability to increase neighborhood capacity as needed between boundary reviews to address unexpected overcrowding). |
Anonymous
Not the PP, but obvious to me to make options bigger. Henry and Oakridge are so overcrowded for one reason: parents have been packing I to those zones to avoid the surrounding neighborhood schools. Making neighborhood schools like them bigger just worsens that problem and will lead to more frequent rezonings, lobbying, etc. make the option schools bigger and you give more people more choices. It's nice to have choices. Which behavior do you wa t to support, more self segregation, or more countywide integration? |
Anonymous
Okay, so let's leave Henry as it is and move Montessori to Fleet instead to give more option opportunities. I'm sure the sibling families who didn't get a spot for next year would be thrilled. |
Anonymous
That's assuming that many/most people are choosing option schools because they believe they are best for their child, or if they are also an opportunity to escape a poor or overcrowded neighborhood school. Option schools can just as easily be a drain on neighborhood schools by providing an out for families who don't want to deal with problems. Meanwhile, solid neighborhood schools that families don't want to leave end up overcrowded if you make them the smaller facilities. Option schools are supposed to be the bonus in the school system, offering an additional educational option for families. Using them to instead as escape routes from undesirable schools is hurting matters, not helping. |
Anonymous
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I agree -- option schools should not trump or detract quality from neighborhood schools. They offer a way to create a more integrated system, so maybe placing them more strategically makes sense.
Though maybe that's an argument for just making everything lottery only. |