Reply to Post-ATS Education - Middle and High School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s not a question of picking apart any one program, but rather looking at what works and implementing it system-wide, to the extent possible. If Montessori is so amazing, then why is it so limited? If ATS has an ideal learning environment, why is it only at one school?

They just eliminated the year-round program at Carlin Springs because of cost, why don’t they look at other programs for lessons learned and stop all of this inter-county transfer nonsense.

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The modified calendar was at Barcroft.

But I otherwise generally agree with your sentiment.  The problem with IB, however, is the expense.  If APS wants to commit to making every HS an IB school, then that's one thing.  But as long as a small %age of students opt to take the program (full-time), that's a program that makes more fiscal sense to retain at one location.  It requires specially trained teachers, actual in-person teachers for languages, and a yearly fee to the IB organization of about $10K.

The main take-away from ATS that's needed at every school is high expectations and some degree of structure.  All elementary schools should also be using the same curriculum and instructional methods.  APS says they are; but that's not completely accurate.[/quote]
So each school bus that is unnecessary (from bussing walkers to a different school for "equity") is around 90k.  I live in the Innovation walk zone but am bussed to asfs.  For my neighborhood (all of which is in the innovation walk zone), there are 7 buses.  That's over 500k that is being spent unnecessarily because they didn't want to bus Rosslyn to Long Branch or Taylor (those kids are already on a bus to innovation, but it would be a longer bus ride to another school).  I'm glad we stayed at asfs personally because we were looking to buy a house in the neighborhood around there, so I'm not complaining because I care or because I think when they revise boundaries they should move us to save money.  In fact I think people would be really upset if they moved us to innovation at this point since starting over with an entirely new community at asfs was hard this year after coming back from the pandemic for most of the neighborhood kids and the idea of doing it again in two years is slightly ridiculous.  But, hearing you complain about 10k for a reputable IB program when you compare it with things like how much money is spent bussing people for the sake of bussing them is slightly ridiculous.  To put it in perspective, I think one of those videos APS puts out to pat itself on the back (the back to school videos, etc) are probably 10k.  This is in the noise![/quote]

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