Reply to Is there really nothing "specialized" about the HB curriculum?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here's the thing about choice programs-- we pay a lot of money to bus kids around for them. So we should be asking the purpose of every choice program and whether that busing cost is achieving whatever goal we set for the program. Immersion has a clear purpose-- teaching kids at a young age to speak two languages. Montessori has a clear purpose-- teaching an entirely different academic approach. Arlington Tech is giving kids access to specialized equipment that we can't replicate at the other high school buildings. What is the academic purpose of HB? Even from a diversity perspective, HB doesn't look much different from Yorktown. Every dollar we spend busing those kids is a dollar we could be spending somewhere else in the system.

Additionally, with HB, we're spending over $100M to build a facility that will house 800 kids. Meanwhile, APS has budgeted half that amount to build Reed and Fleet respectively, even though those elementary schools will hold almost just as many kids (Reed- 725 students and Fleet- 750 students). As PPs have stated, there is nothing unique about the academic program at HB-- so we're basically just building a smaller program that only a tiny fraction of kids will randomly be able to get into-- the HB admissions process isn't even targeting the students who could most benefit from being in a smaller school. Meanwhile, we can't build a 4th high school to house 1800 kids because most of our bond capacity has been eaten up by the HB construction. Almost everyone in the county with kids 6th grade and younger will be harmed by the School Board's stupid decision to devote so much bond capacity to the Wilson project without increasing the HB program to include additional seats. Our kids are the ones who will be hit by the hardest by the high school capacity mess.

The Wilson school construction is too far down the path to stop, but that doesn't mean you can't redesign the HB program to at least make it accessible to more kids. You could increase class size. You could rent nearby office space to create more classrooms. Additionally, for those of you who bothered to watch the CIP work sessions, the School Board said that with the opening of Stratford, they can still accommodate more middle school kids with trailers. In contrast, they are literally going to run out of space at the 3 existing high school sites even with trailers unless they create more high school seats somewhere. So take the middle school kids out of HB and make it high school only. This isn't about hating HB, it is about math. We need to create sufficient space for high school students or we're going to be resorting to shift schedules and on-line classes within 8 years. That's been explicitly stated by Murphy and the School Board.[/quote]

The admissions process includes the element of choice--there is a program design, and (by the time your kid is in fifth grade) deciding if the HB approach is appropriate for your kid. BTW, many kids start out there and then switch back to their home school because they decide it is not the right fit. The lottery aspect is because more kids want to try it then there are seats, but its the parents and kids who have to decide if the approach is better for them than the model of the comprehensive schools. There are tradeoffs and differences--it's not accurate to say "there is nothing unique about the academic program." Having the same TA for all of high school is unique. Not having any team sports other than ultimate at your high school is unique.

Secondly, they did increase the size of HB already and it will increase more when they move to Wilson. Stop saying they didn't. [/quote]

Sorry, deciding if the HB approach is appropriate for your kid is part of the admissions process--you have to actively apply. The school doesn't decide who is qualified to go there, the families do. The school just allocates the available slots randomly from those who have self-selected for admission. [/quote]

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