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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]ATS should mandate 2/3rds of slots for lower socioeconomic and minority students, similar to how Montessori does their prek. I have no problem with ATS existing or being a home for attentive parents. But it should favor disadvantaged every step of the way. And, please don't tell me its FRL rate is similar or better than other schools, that is truly irrelevant. Its FRL needs to be twice the worst neighborhood school, and its student demographics needs to flip the stats of U.S. public. Then you know it's really serving those who need it in our society. [/quote]

This is an interesting comment, but I think that APS just needs to offer more schools that use the ATS model.  This is a public school district.  It’s unfair to offer a product like ATS- the literal best public elementary school in Virginia- when it benefits so few of the taxpaying population.  I would be fine with them setting aside percentage for students receiving FRL, but there’s no getting around the fact that we need more ATS slots for everyone.[/quote]

All of the options are built and supported by the fact that there is demand for 125%, maybe 175%, of capacity, but no more. As a public system, you don't want to build an option building that then depends on you struggling to fill it every year. As others have noted here, there are huge swaths of APS system that do NOT want rigid ATS for their kids. And if your answer is,fine, don't build buildings, just implement inside current schoools, then I strongly suggest you look into the lessons learned from the failures of "schools win schools" in APS. Long story short, nothing makes a local school more like a civil war battleground than when you ty to divide up its classrooms between very different pedagogies. See Montessori experience at Drew. [/quote]

But demand for ATS is almost 200% of current capacity. Way more than demand for other options. [/quote] This is a fact. look at the waitlists. You could fill a second APS and I think you could fill quite a few more HBs. That said, why is HB such a short school if it was a new build? Why didn't APS maximize that space. Wait, I know why. WE HAVE A HORRIBLE SCHOOL BOARD AND THEY ALL MUST GO.[/quote]

Its true that part of the reason HB works is because all the adults know all the kids, and the kids know that they have a lot of freedom but at the same time have to act to a reasonable standard. It wouldn't work with twice as many kids, or if there were tons of kids there that didn't really want to be there. Not every teacher wants to be in a school where the students can wander around freely and address them directly, and not every teenager can handle being in a building where they can wander around freely and address adults directly--especially if they haven't been given increasing amounts of independence and responsibility all along, and seen it modeled from all of their older peers.

I had kids at both Gunston and HB and I can tell you -- you can't just take parts of the HB model and plunk it down somewhere else, or double it in size. I assume the same is true with ATS. Or at least, you won't automatically get the same results. Not to say there aren't aspects that could be replicated other places, or lessons to be learned, it's just not something you can easily do 1:1. [/quote]

100 agree with this take on HB. I also have a kid at HB and one in a different APS MS. You just can't replicate the HB model in a much larger school. Whatever - it's a moot point - the site in Rosslyn can't handle trailers.

I am definitely in favor of more programs of a smaller size though since parents seem to want that. [/quote]

And the rest of us would like to deal in reality. If a program like HB only works because it's small, then we should have gotten rid of it and put a bigger choice school on the Wilson site. A 7-12 program for 1300 kids would still be a lot smaller than the current MS and HS programs, and for kids who are satisfied with team sports limited to frisbee, it would be a godsend.

I'm not interested in replicating ATS until someone shows that it has benefits that last past 5th grade. If you want to define success as high SOLs in 5th, you're free to do so, and good luck getting into a school that will deliver. But the rest of us want something with bigger benefits. [/quote]

They considered that and the cost of building than 6 stories were not just incrementally higher, they were geometrically higher. (That's universal--it's why you see so many apartment buildings that height, too.) [/quote]

I'm not sure where you're getting that. Community presentations showed that the least expensive way to get 1300 more seats was to build them on Wilson. But 22207 parents and HB parents created a unified whine that stopped the SB from doing so[/quote]

Sure, because 1300 families didn't want to send their kids to a neighborhood school in downtown Rosslyn with no fields, no outdoor space, and no parking. That is not a crazy position. And the Heights building technically could hold more kids than it does if it had all traditional classrooms, but there are only 25 kids on the 2 floors used by the Shriver program.  [/quote]

Can anyone clarify, if Shriver truly occupies two entire floors at the Heights?  And only for 25 students?!  [/quote]

Sort of--the floors are different sizes in that building, and there are some joint-use facilities in the building for both programs (gym, cafeteria, etc). The Shriver program would take up a lot of space no matter where it is located. There are several small APS programs that take up a good amount of space relative to enrollment. They all serve important populations and are worth the money, compared to the cost of educating those kids in other settings or losing those kids from the system (to drugs, jail, motherhood, etc.). [/quote]

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