Reply to APS: Think the "no move" campaign is going to work?

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Reply to "APS: Think the "no move" campaign is going to work?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]if the county would just ditch the option schools, it would be so much easier to get this done.  I just don't understand the move first approach.[/quote]

Lisa Stengle made an interesting point at the SB meeting the other night about how option schools help manage capacity issues, just not in the way we usually think about them.  She said that if there were no option schools and every school was neighborhood, they would have severe boundary issues and difficulty filling schools in certain parts of the county because of how schools are distributed geographically.  One thing strategically-placed option schools allows them to do is open up space where schools are otherwise too close together to draw reasonable boundaries.  Think Carlin Springs/Campbell/Barcroft/Claremont/Randolph or McKinley/Ashlawn/Reed/Barrett/Glebe/Tuckahoe, where it would be nearly impossible to draw boundaries for some schools without drawing from other schools' walk zones.  Option schools do tend to draw disproportionately from surrounding schools so the impact on capacity in the area isn't as significant, and allows more reasonable boundaries to be drawn for the remaining neighborhood schools.

I'd always thought the argument that option schools help manage capacity was about pulling students from over-crowded schools to areas with excess capacity, and never bought into it because APS can't control where students come from (except for HB).  This was a totally different way of looking at it that I hadn't thought of before, and it makes a lot of sense.[/quote]

the locations of schools in arlington is really, really weird, but it's based on history, i guess,  and rich folk  wanting carefully tucked away schools up north.[/quote]

It’s also about history of student population growth patterns.  For instance, back in the early 2000s, Nottingham was so under capacity (I think around 60%) that they were talking about closing it.  Within 10 years, it had swung to 140% capacity due to turnover in housing stock, Tuckahoe was also at 140%, and that part of Arlington was drowning - that was the impetus for Discovery.  During at same period, the county started focusing more on increased affordable housing, but APS couldn’t start planning for that unless they had a reliable sense of how much housing would be put where, and how many students it would generate.  APS knows now that affordable housing generates far more students per unit than other apartment-style housing, but that’s not something they could reasonably anticipate/plan for until it started happening.  Given the number of years it takes to get a school construction project done, APS was necessarily behind the ball on responding to that growth, which they’re trying to do now (which is part of what this location process is about).

There are also geographic factors in play.  For instance, the way the GE Parkway, Spout Run, 66 and Lee Highway all come together makes it virtually impossible to find a school site there where they could build a new elementary school that’s reasonably accessible transit-wise.  People pointing to Dawson Terrace are completely ignoring the fact that it’s difficult to get to, would have virtually no teacher parking (even street parking), almost no walk zone so it couldn’t be a neighborhood school, and the buses needed for an option school would have difficulty navigating the roadways.  So sure, we could use another elementary school in that area, but there’s no county-owned land that the county is willing to part with that would be suitable for a school.[/quote]

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