Reply to Is APS really looking to close a N. Arlington elem school again?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hey Nottingham, Mary K. is going to kill your school. Tune in to the board meeting Dec. 18. She’s already ruled out closing Taylor and while Mary’s proposal will mention a south ES, the huge lack of seats in the south means not even Drew will be converted to an option school. (Also, good luck taking that historic black community’s school from them and bussing their kids elsewhere, amirite?). This means only Nottingham is left and please remember Mary supported that school being swing space last year. Good luck. [/quote]

Wow, grabbing the popcorn. She's using her last meeting to propose closing Nottingham AND a cascading boundary process that will impact Jamestown, Discovery, Tuckahoe, Taylor, Glebe and Cardinal? 340 students may not sound like much but they're not going to easily get rolled into the next school over. There aren't 170 seats available at Discovery and Tuckahoe. It's going to be a cascading boundary process to balance enrollments across all those schools. That's a pretty cowardly thing to do at your last meeting. Make your successors run a controversial school closing and boundary process while you get out of town. And what are they gonna do with a closed building anyway?[/quote]

Empty Nottingham, then temporary move all of Taylor and raze that building and put up classrooms with walls etc. but they just built new playground so that seems unlikely. Probably a SA school?[/quote]

There is no money to rebuild Taylor. APS has maxxed out its bond capacity. They need to look at the facilities and then close the worst one. It might be Taylor. Are there other elementary buildings in worse shape?  [/quote]

They haven't maxed out their bond capacity. Did you look at the close-out document? They're way under their 10% debt capacity. The CIP direction is also posted. Looks like they're wasting a lot of money just to save the idea of building more seats on the ACC campus. More seats are, what, 100 seats (capacity of renovated ACC minus capacity of knocked down MPSA)? That's pennies compared to the dollars they're wasting with all the extra studying they're asking staff to do in this CIP direction. They're clearly delaying moving MPSA into the ACC even though it was already approved and bonded for $45M. And instead, they're going to study Nottingham and then the costs will go up because of the delay and the Nottingham community is going to put up roadblocks when the ACC neighborhood had already accepted the school on the site. This is a mess. They should have just stuck with the plan. People who want Taylor renovated, follow the mistakes being made now and that's why your school won't be in this CIP.

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What I meant was that the bond capacity was maxxed out with the existing plan for Montessori/AT/career center. I guess they could get some of that back if they change the plan. [/quote]

Moving MPSA to the old ACC is in the current CIP and no bond capacity isn't close to its max in the current CIP. If they change the plan now, they will increase costs and waste time in finishing the ACC site with a plan the community supported. They'll lose bond capacity in the process and delay later projects (like Taylor). You'd have to renovate Nottingham if you wanted to move MPSA there and increase its capacity and change boundaries across north Arlington. Nottingham is smaller than MPSA. Changing the plan is costly and controversial. Why would the board want to do that? [/quote]

[b]Since APS disposed of its planning department, they would have to spend money on out-of-state consultants[/b] and a public process that would last the better part of a year. I think that’s why APS is looking to use Langston for swing space, even if they haven’t said so publicly. That plan, if true, entails keeping Nottingham open as a neighborhood school for now.

The era of boundary changes may be over—for the next few years. I’m even doubting APS will spend time and money on the proposed high school boundary changes that were supposed to coincide with the opening of the new Arlington Tech building. That process should have started this year. And I guess the Ashlawn/Yorktown families are still happy they get automatic/guaranteed neighborhood transfers into W-L. They are the only Arlington neighborhood with a guaranteed choice of two high schools for all four years.

I’m beginning to think that the current crop of Syphax/APS decision-makers would rather not mess with boundaries again if they can avoid doing so. They have probably observed the boundary change struggles over at FCPS and MCPS this past year. [/quote]

I expect the planning team to pop up as those consultants, after forming an LLC. Then they are just outside of the system.[/quote]

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