Reply to ASFS/Key Swap Off . . .

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

Are you saying that white UMC parents are telling the community that APS may just shutter a school at a time when enrollment is sky high? I have a hard time believing that if so.
[/quote]

Go listen to what the speakers before the school board in Spanish have said.  They are not focused on the benefits of immersion, and why they want immersion.  They are focused on why they want a school close to them.  Listening to them, it is clear that they believe if immersion moves their kids will not be able to attend school in the Key bldg.  The problem is the FARMS hispanic community is by and large not sold on the benefits of immersion.   They care about proximity for sure.  They care about having people in the front office and school workers who they can communicate with in Spanish.  But the benefits of their kids learning to read in Spanish?  That they are not sold on.

The wealthy spanish speaking expat community  is very sold on the benefits of immersion- but they don't have the same hardships if the location moves, and there are not enough of them to provide a 50% native speaker ratio.

The white UMC parents who dominate the Key PTA etc- are sold on the benefits of immersion.  They are also convinced that they 'need' the native speakers to make sure their kids get the maximum benefit from the immersion program.   They are also the ones who are largely taking advantage of extended day, dropping kids and metro ing to work- etc.  The location works very well for them.   They know that those reasons are not compelling for leaving the school where it is- so they are attempting to rally the shrinking number of nearby hispanic families who do benefit from Key as an immersion school.   But to get them to turn out- they are disguising the fact that if immersion moves those families would still be eligible to attend school at Key.

If they were really trying to look out for those families they would be focused on what Key immersion currently offers those families that could also be offered by the new neighborhood elementary school- e.g. bilingual school social workers, bilingual front office workers- and make sure that those things would continue.  After all- as was previously pointed out up thread- there is more Spanish to be found on the Barrett PTA website than the Key PTA website, these type of things are not unique to Key.  [/quote]

[b]I don’t buy the idea that group a is trying to fool group b into believing that their kids won’t be able to attend school in a specific building. That is just too easily disproven. [/quote]
Working to fool? Probably not. 
Working to make sure everyone understands? No.[/quote][/b]

And APS doesn't help-- if you go back and read the August memos and the Q&A with Key, APS basically supports this notion.  The memos and APS' analysis are based on their (incorrect) assumption that everyone currently at Key would move with the Immersion program.  When directly asked about this issue, APS punted and said it would be something they would look into later.  But any fool who can read the transfer reports and do basic math knows that the ASFS/Key attendance zone had over 900 elementary aged kids in it last year--- almost 2/3 went to ASFS and 1/3 to Key (the rest to other schools).  That means, if the swapped had happened, APS could have possibly had to try and fit all those kids in the Key building (with a preferred attendance of 750).  Obviously they couldn't do that and they would have also had to redrawn boundaries to fix the overpopulated ASFS/Key zone-- but once they did that, it defeated APS' stated purpose for the swap, which was to keep the ASFS community together. [/quote]

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