Reply to Is there really nothing "specialized" about the HB curriculum?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]HB is not meaningfully increasing class size. Fall 2018: HB will have 249 MS and 440 HS students. Fall 2026: HB will have 279 MS and 440 HS students. HB is adding 10 kids to each MS class-- 30 kids total. That's it.

Meanwhile by 2026: WF will have 3,294 HS students, WJ will have 2,101 students, and YT will have 2,642 students-- that's 8,000 high school kids, in three existing high school buildings that are only built to hold 6,500 total. These are the APS projections posted to the APS website, not made up numbers.

You have to be completely clueless to not understand why there are so many elementary school parents who are pissed off about the decision to spend $100M in bond funding to build HB without meaningfully adding more capacity. The current CIP conversations right now are a complete disaster. They have no viable solution to create sufficient high school seats by 2026 with the available bond funding.  [/quote]

Still cheaper to build at the Wilson site, which the SB already owns, than to buy more land. Or wait for the County Board to give us some--we would still be waiting. (Note: We are. That's why we're discussing the stupid Career Center site instead of somewhere more suitable for a school--because the CB won't give us anything better.) [/quote]

Agreed, but they could also have increased the size of HB when the program moved. There is a lot of wasted air space in that weird staggered fan design they building out for HB (and I suspect a lot of extra architecture/building costs too). So 800 current HB snowflakes get to keep their small school for $100M after they move, even though it ate up all the bond capacity to create adequate seats for future generations of kids at the other three high schools. Maybe I win the HB lottery in the future, but likely I don't because the HB odds will keep getting slimmer as the larger APS elementary cohorts start working their way up to middle school. Do you want to keep a ~5% chance that your kid will attend HB for high school (odds in 2026) even if that means a much larger chance that your kid is going to be in a 2,600 student body crammed into a high school building built for 2,000? Or do you want to figure out a way to add students to HB to spread out the overcrowding? I'm a 1st grade parent who can't believe how bad the outlook is for high school seats for my kid-- and I can't begin to understand how anyone thought it was wise to use up $100M of bond funding on a new MS/HS building and not add capacity at the same time given where projections were pointing. It just defies all logic unless the HB parents were only looking out for their own kids at the time and not thinking about the longer-term picture for the entire county. If there is nothing specialized about the HB curriculum, then get rid of the program-- or at the very least, try to get more kids into the existing program with larger classes. We need those seats.[/quote]

I guess I don't understand the hate for the "HB parents." They didn't make any of the decisions (school location, school size, building design)--the school board did. And HB is co-located with the Stratford program, which is taking up a fair amount of that space and bonding capacity, don't forget. The program is expanding and losing the history tied to its building, and it is getting moved to a building that doesn't have fields and doesn't have parking. HB parents weren't pushing this, at all. Go back and read the Sun Gazette archives or watch the SB hearings. [/quote]

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