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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]McKinley's size would make it a good choice for a hybrid program.  With both expeditionary learning and neighborhood walkers OP has an interesting idea.[/quote]

McKinley as a location for an expeditionary learning program???  Sorry, just snorted the coffee out of my nose. Clearly you have never been to McKinley's campus. Unless those kids are going to be crawling through the backyards of Madison Manor, where exactly are these kids doing their "outdoor" learning? [/quote]

There is nothing in the expeditionary learning model that is specifically tied to outdoor/natural environment education, that's just the way APS/Campbell have decided to implement it. You can have expeditionary learning in the middle of a dense city, you just implement it differently. Not that I'm signing on the idea of McKinley as an option school, just making the broader point.

That said, developing a whole new curriculum is expensive, so I think the SB will be very reluctant to move Campbell to a location that would make the nature-based curriculum infeasible. Which is why this whole notion the staff came up with of choosing the locations and first and then not deciding which goes where later was always foolish, and I'm glad the SB has finally said so. It would be such a disaster to choose a slate of option schools only to realize after the decision is made that you don't have a suitable site for one of the schools.[/quote]

Tuckahoe's "theme" is nature and it already has an extensive garden-- and it borders an Arlington park. If Campbell has to move, the Tuckahoe building is the closest thing to replicating what Campbell has now. As an alternative, the thing Nottingham has going for it over Tuckahoe is that Nottingham is on a much, much bigger piece of property and could expand to hold more students than Tuckahoe with trailers. Picking McKinley as the option site doesn't solve the fundamental problem of the overlapping walk zones among Discovery-Nottingham-Tuckahoe, not to mention that the SB had to move a bunch of preschool classes to Jamestown after Discovery opened because otherwise Jamestown would have had a bunch of empty classrooms too. The walk zones of McKinley and Reed don't overlap by that much-- mainly 14040, 14041, and 14042 (currently 103 kids total) and McKinley is overcapacity already by 100+ students and needed to shed about that many kids anyway. You could drawn the McKinley/Reed/Ashlawn/Glebe lines a number of different ways, but all three schools will easily fill to capacity with kids currently living in 22205. It is an entirely different story once you push into 22207 and 22213-- that's where APS has built too many neighborhood seats in the NW corner where it is less densely populated, especially when you add Jamestown into the Discovery-Tuckahoe-Nottingham equation. I am guessing APS would love to be able to move the preschool kids currently at Jamestown to a more centrally-located building too. It makes sense to shift more K-5 kids from Discovery to Jamestown, more Nottingham to Discovery, and then consolidate whatever is left of Nottingham and Tuckahoe into one of those two buildings. If Reed or McKinley or Ashlawn end up with extra space, then you bring the Jamestown preschool kids to one of those buildings. [/quote]

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