Reply to 8/27 APS Work Session—Elementary Boundaries

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

It's amazing to me all the time and tax-payer resources that went into promoting the swap.  I really hope it was PK's baby because otherwise someone needs to leave APS for being so inept and basically setting the whole location review process back a year. 
[/quote]

what real time or taxpayer resources went into this?  I really think this was always the plan- and I think APS accomplished its goal.  It has made it increasingly clear that Key immersion has to move- that site is needed.  Asserting the swap, and that they would discuss it later, bought them time during the south arlington boundary process- which they needed.  It also bought them time to continue to check projections and get closer to the opening of Reed.  They need to do the Key immersion move along with the boundary process, otherwise there is no political desire for it.   There will be more of a political will for it when the rest of the county sees how not moving Key will impact them personally.

So time- it was a win.  Taxpayer resources?  Really- APS didn't spend much 'promoting' the swap.  All they really did was say they would talk about it later- then say they weren't going to.  [/quote]

There was some key information that was not available at the time of the swap announcement - including the new student growth projections and the lottery information - that they probably had a good idea was true but didn't have the official numbers. Now it is very clear that both ASFS and Key need to be neighborhood to have any kind of reasonable boundaries and that there are not actually very many native speakers clamoring for entry to Key on Key. I totally agree it was a distraction technique so they could deal with Fleet boundaries without having to touch Key/Long Branch/ASFS/Taylor. Shady, of course, but effective. [/quote]

Well if it was a distraction technique it was pretty effective at distracting the SB itself who had to deal with lots of parents questioning the decision. Better to have said nothing at all.[/quote]
I don't know if this is even true though -- school board members came to the ASFS PTA once about the swap, and once to the Key PTA (I believe).  They may have had people coming to office hours, but when I went for other reasons to office hours, the school board member I talked to said she hadn't seen anyone from ASFS all fall.  Yes, it was a distraction technique, and it worked really well -- good for them.  [/quote]

They had to say something.  The ASFS parents who are in the walk zone, but not zoned to ASFS, had spent all summer lobbying the school board to draw the ASFS boundary as part of the South Arlington process that would include them in the ASFS zone.  There had also been a group of parents lobbying to not include the walk zone.  The ASFS fight threatened to overwhelm the South Arlington boundary process and really tie the hands of APS when they went to open Reed (b/c they try not to move a planning until more than once every 5 years.)

Announcing the swap meant that both the School Board and the staff could say 'thankyou for your comments, we will engage your further on this in January- for all of the Fall of 2018.'    
Then come Jan 2019- they switched to 'thankyou for your comments, we think we need both sites as neighborhood- we will engage you more on boundaries soon.'  
It's really a minimal resource expenditure for APS.
It also had the side benefit of causing the Key community to get really organized, and attempt to trot out as many spanish speaking neighbors to the Key site as they could advocating for immersion at Key.  Despite this massive organization- they still can't fill their spanish speaking slots at that location.

I don't necessarily think it was fully planned out as a distraction.  If both communities had been okay with it- they might have gone ahead with it b/c it would still have put APS in a better spot than it is with Key as immersion. [/quote]

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