Reply to APS Fall boundary questionnaire

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Arlington parents of all backgrounds have said over and over in surveys, public comment, etc. how important neighborhood schools (ie proximity) is to them. When you have two working parents, pick up at aftercare on the other side of the county just isn't feasible. That's more important to most parents than uprooting the entire system to balance numbers. Sorry, that's the truth. Start with the high school kids for the grand lottery experiment. If it goes well, move to the middle schoolers. Only then can you attempt the full lottery elementary idea.

Then maybe we should end options programs

That is what the Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer should do.

APS option schools just make neighborhood schools more inequitable. Like a giant sucking sound - of stable families leaving their neighborhood schools for a *better* option. APS should do better.[/quote]

This comes up all the time and people are just wrong about this. The numbers do not work.  Even if every kid went to their local school instead of option - it still would not make a dent in the demographic make up of the low performing school.  1 building in south arlington has  more than twice the # of kids of an entire single family neighborhood.  If you have a school with 5+ affordable housing buildings and 1 single family neighborhood - that school is not improving.

If you get rid of option schools - lets be generous and say of the wealthier families 1/3 of people will move, 1/3  will go private and 1/3 will stay (btw many fewer kids went to Drew during the last redistrict than even those #s would indicate).  Regardless the people who are left will not be large enough to reform an entire school.  They will also not be wealthy enough to reform an entire school.  You can't expect a dozen middle class families to pull a school with 700 students out of its hole.  The wealthy families will have bailed and the only people left are those who didn't have money to bail and one or two bleeding heart types.  They are absolutely not the people who can fundraise 800k for the PTA.

What [/quote]

I realize this is a minor point in your post, but what could a PTA even do with $800K that would make a difference?  Our PTA tells us they aren't allowed (by the governing PTA rules) to buy text books (but somehow they can buy books for the library), can't buy play ground equipment, or shade tents, or make any permanent improvements to buildings, or pay for more teachers or aids.  So what can a PTA really do besides coat drives, food drives, gift drives, read a thons, and the like.  I don't see those kinds of things changing schools drastically.[/quote]

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