Reply to Fleeing APS schools for FFX County

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It depends on whether you can afford to buy into one of the better schools. FCPS has done a much better job than APS at pushing the worst of those issues into the schools people can least afford to leave.[/quote]

How so? APS is very segregated and avoids demographic balance by claiming walk zones are a priority. [/quote]

Right, but at least they're not (in most cases) making the overcrowded poor schools remain overcrowded without a boundary change, and they're not talking about doing split shifts only at Wakefield.

In FFX, they let Bailey's ES look like a favela for a very long time, only to relive them by moving half the kids into a foreclosed office building with no playground or gymnasium and calling it an "upper ES." They would not have dared propose such a solution at Chesterbrook. 
[/quote]

Yes, this is what I’m talking about. A school system can’t do much about housing demographics. But if APS did what FCPS does, you wouldn’t see a trailer anywhere north of Route 50 even though they’d have all of the choice schools because the neighborhoods closest to Route 50 would be bused south to make more room for the north of Lee Highway folks.[/quote]

Huh?  If FCPS had issues similar to APS, they’d expand HB Woodlawn and convert it to a normal school, not spend a ton of money so a few hundred kids could have a private-school experience.[/quote]

Whereas APS is moving HB to a site the surrounding neighborhoods rejected as inferior for a neighborhood school (because no one has to send their kid to HB if they don’t like the location) so they could maintain the program while turning the better site into an expanded neighborhood school.[/quote]
I'm sorry -- that's not what happened, or at least what I perceived as having happened as a resident near the Wilson school site.  My neighbors and I wanted that to be a neighborhood school.  It was people from outside the neighrborhood that lobbied against it.  
Albeit I didn't have kids in school at the time, so I didn't watch school board meetings, so maybe there were people outside of our civic association/neighborhood that were actively lobbying one way or the other.[/quote]

There was substantial contingent of families who would have been within the Wilson site zone who protested making it a neighborhood school because it wasn't going to have the same kind of green space and other amenities the other neighborhood high schools had given that it was on a more compact site in a more urban location.

The debate about the Wilson site as a neighborhood school was nearly identical to the current debate about the Career Center site. Given that we keep coming back to this same issue, I think at some point we need to accept that the nature of our schools has to change as the county becomes more densely populated, and will have to more closely resemble urban schools than sprawling suburban ones.[/quote]

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