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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t know HB people.  You gotta know you’re going to get picked on in your brand new building while the rest of our middle school kids are in literal falling down hovels.  Small price to pay while we fight over some pathetic scraps to half ass some renovations for the rest of the middle schools to maybe do some small improvements.[/quote]

See, here's the thing.  HB families were forced to move to where they are now so their old building could be converted to Hamm.  It was the last thing the community wanted to do.  They were perfectly fine in their crappy old building.  So it's really not fair to pin this on them.[/quote]

Stratford is the LARGEST plot of land with a middle school on it. Of course they were happy to stay there; [b]they were given the option of staying if they were willing to expand the school to help middle school overcrowding but they said that the small size was a core necessity of their program.[/b]

Lots of students in Arlington have crappy old buildings; most middle school students, tech until last year, probably half of the elementary schools are much much worse. [/quote]

This is not true.  I had kids there at the time.  The community fought tooth and nail not to move.  In fact, the HB community back then quite deliberately never complained about their aging facility because they didn't want to rock the boat.

I'm not sure what you expected the county to do.  Force the school to move and then build it something shitty to move to?[/quote]

The "Stay and Expand" Option
In the early planning stages (circa early 2014), the initial proposal was actually for HBW to stay at the Stratford site and potentially grow by a small amount, while a new neighborhood middle school would be built at the Wilson School site in Rosslyn. This was known among community members as "Option M-5."  
However, several factors led the School Board to shift away from this:
• The Enrollment Crisis: APS needed to create 1,300 new middle school seats quickly. The Stratford site was one of the largest properties available. 
• The "Smallness" of HBW: H-B Woodlawn is a choice program that prides itself on a small, intimate community (at the time, roughly 650–700 students). To justify keeping HBW on such a large site during a seat shortage, the program would have had to expand significantly (to 1,000+ or even 1,300 seats).
• Program Culture: The HBW community and staff were vocal that doubling the size of the program to meet the county's capacity needs would fundamentally "break" the school's culture and philosophy.[/quote]

That doesn't prove what you think it does.  In fact, it proves the opposite.  The school system needed a large middle school quickly and it needed HB's space to do it.  For HB to stay there, it would have to double in size.  That didn't make sense to anyone involved.

I lived it.  You didn't.[/quote]

They literally were given the option to stay but had to double in size. And they refused. [/quote]

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