Reply to Please explain how Henry parent position on CC makes sense

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Please explain how Henry parent position on CC makes sense"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]According to the board, nothing has been decided yet, so we can’t say anything about the site is “clear”. But it also doesn’t seem likely that they’ll make them choice seats at this point. None of the CIP planning scenarios involved adding choice seats to the CC; they all relied on making it neighborhood.

I’m just not sure that choice seats are the answer, regardless where you put them. What happens if they can’t fill them? Or if enrollment growth doesn’t flatten out just outside the ten year window? Then we’d be back where we are right now, needing to build another comprehensive high school but with $100 million less to work with.

I don’t care where the high school goes, personally. But not building a comprehensive one now seems like it would be more expensive in the long run. [/quote]

And does everyone actually understand WHY all the scenarios have those seats as neighborhood?  Because the Arlington Heights and Penrose advocates have been insisting on a neighborhood school from the beginning!!!!!  Well, they're likely to get their frickin' neighborhood school; but this demonstrates exactly why you need to be careful what you ask for, to advocate strategically, and to let the process (the working group) do its work.  Then, if you don't like it, object.  Despite their good intentions, these people have put the rest of us on the path to being screwed right along with them.[/quote]

I don’t think you can blame the neighborhoods for this. The first proposal was for 1300 seats at one of the three sites. No way that was going to be a choice program. Then when the SB went with the hybrid option the SB deliberately left the type of seats ambiguous. Arlington Heights said at the beginning that they would support a neighborhood high school at the site if it could be done with facilities comparable to the other high schools. At no point did any of these neighborhoods “push” to get a neighborhood school divorced from the discussion about facilities. They were always linked.

The only reason the neighborhoods felt the need to speak out in the first place was because the SB refused to provide any clarity about what type of seats they would be. Why would they do that? Well, choice seats obviously wouldn’t provoke much neighborhood opposition, considering what was already there. So the only reason someone wouldn’t provide clarity is that they wanted to keep the option of neighborhood seats open. So why wouldn’t a neighborhood want to say something BEFORE design choices got made that would determine the type of seats? Waiting until the process played itself out would just give the county the ability to say “sorry folks, too late, it’s a done deal.”

The alternative strategy for the neighborhood would have been to go full NIMBY, like Glen Carlyn. But the neighborhood (apparently wrongly) thought that the SB wouldn’t use the slightest hint of cooperation as a chance to just screw the neighborhood in order to solve their problems elsewhere.

[/quote]

I do blame the hardcore advocates on this.  The SB thinks and feels it has "listened" and has "heard" the community and is responding accordingly.  They heard "neighborhood high school" above all else.  The advocates at the outset did not differentiate between the 700-800 seats from the 1300 hybrid decision and a full-sized fourth comprehensive high school.  They emphasized "neighborhood seats."  And now, their all-or-nothing stance will preclude a lot of positive benefits that could be brought to their communities as well as the broader Pike community.  The 800 seats are coming - that's the hybrid solution that was already determined.  The neighborhood wasn't part of that.  The working group was established to determine HOW, not IF 800 seats.

So, if the SB also listens and hears the everything or nothing, and doesn't push with the County to make it happen, we're going to spend millions of $s for 800 seats that makes the $ spent on HBW cost-effective.  And, there will be no new fields, no new amenities, no new library, no new performance space, no new investment in the Pike redevelopment from this opportunity.

The CB is talking with the property owners of the land on the Pike.  If they actually produce something out of that, and again APS says "no, never mind, we don't want the land"????? OMG!!!  We have to get it together, folks![/quote]

So wait, let me get this right. APS vomits up a half-baked proposal with a bunch of unknowns. The neighborhood says "It looks like you're considering making these neighborhoods seats. We'd support that [i][b]IF[/b][/i] you can provide facilities comparable to the other schools." The SB says "great, so neighborhood seats it is, no facilities, got it!"

And you blame the neighborhood for this?

The only thing I can think of to blame the neighborhood for is thinking the school board understands how "if-then" statements work. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics