Reply to Does anyone send the children to Jefferson-Houston in Alexandria?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Neither the current City Council or the current School Board seem to really care about the overall mess or how bad the schools are in Alexandria, which has been quite evident for a very long time.[/quote]

Agreed! That's why Alexandrians voted over 50% of School Board out. District B had a 100% change over.  There are 9 members of Schools Board and 5 are newly elected. In fact Thurs. night is the Induction meeting of the new School Board members. This is a breath of fresh air and the new members are very dedicated to making changes. [/quote]

There wasn't some clean sweep. Only two incumbents lost. Others did not run for re-election. It is a pretty thankless job, and I don't know why anyone would want to do it for more than one term.[/quote]

The ACPS School Board task could be easier if the sky isn't the limit on available programs and emphasis is placed where it truly belongs: on rigorous academics. Obviously school buildings themselves were not attended to as they should have been by past school boards. Not this past board, but the past boards that were too busy dealing with the new way-over-budget TC Williams High School and then drunk Superintendent Rebecca Perry's decision making. That ACPS Board should have outright fired Perry, but instead gave her a raise and a new contract. Into this mayhem came super high salary and benefits demanding Mort Sherman who put every new program on the book. You can't make this stuff up folks: it happened right in our own Alexandria City backyard. There is a reason why our school board work is thankless task: wrong decision making haunts us for decades. You can't pay or play your way out of stupid. Alexandrian's are rightfully speaking up as we labor to support the persistent mediocre system via our hard earned money through taxes, with minimal improvement overall in the last decade in the standing of the ACPS (see VDOE list of public school systems and where we fall).

We seem to have gotten on a somewhat better footing, but the current ACPS School Board must remember that Alexandria residents only can pay so much in taxes. We are not a huge town and local private sector wage growth (where many of us work) has not increased much since 2008. Our current capital improvement list goes on and on ad nauseum for both City and School and then we have General Fund expenses. Just where is all this money going to come from to carry these proposed City expenses? You can't tax us high enough to do it all and obviously if you do, people will foment and leave, sending Alexandria public schools into even a worse crises. The school board seems happy capacity is increasing but I wonder: how much of the increase in students is covered by the parents who support Alexandria through significant City tax payments and how much through FARMS? Yes, this needs to be considered and discussed, as residents' shoulders can carry just so much water.

Let's not fool ourself: rigor and improvement in ACPS academics is what will bring solid business growth to a City such as ours (we are always in contention with Arlington and Fairfax which have great schools), not poor academic standing. The School Boards main job, as the superintendents, will be easier if they focus on academics needed for our students future job success and publicly pledge this to we residents (we hear very little at School Board meetings on this), especially as our US economy remains tepid in growth and the world economy sits near recession.

So if you want the current thankless task of sitting on ACPS School Board to get better, remember it's primarily about educational academics: reading, writing, mathematics, science and history. That will make the task simpler and improve ACPS at the same time.[/quote]

Said this before - the problem is not with the school board and the school board can't fix it.

The City itself has to decide to stop being a welfare city.  Way too much money is directed towards propping people up in unsustainable households.  Tax money is spent in social services leaving less for schools. [/quote]

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