Reply to The demise of McKinley ES (APS)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Nottingham parents on here keep saying the 2018 facility study was faulty, but APS has never retracted it. And whatever faults were found have never been made public. [/quote]

The faults absolutely were made public. That you weren’t paying attention doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.[/quote]

NP here - I only moved to Arlington recently, and I'm trying to figure out more about what happened in the past to understand the current fights. Can someone please explain the issues in the 2018 report? 
[/quote]
If you weren’t here for the 2018 process, it’s not worth rehashing because it’s irrelevant now.[/quote]

Except for the fact that everyone keeps bringing up past mistakes by the county/SB. I am not a McKinley parent, but I keep hearing from various sources that Nottingham mobilized and hurt other schools during the last zoning go round. It would be helpful to know if there's truth to that. 
[/quote]
You may be referring to the 2014/15 boundary process, which is separate from the 2018 location review.  APS redrew boundaries for NW schools in 2012/13 in preparation for opening Discovery in Fall 2015.  When the new projections came out in fall 2014, they showed that rather than capacity usage being balanced among the schools, McKinley was projected to have significant excess capacity after the expansion was complete while other schools, particularly Ashlawn and Nottingham, would be substantially over capacity.  The school board started a boundary refinement process to adjust the new boundaries approved in 2013 to better balance capacity after Discovery opened and the McKinley expansion was complete.  The staff put forth six potential scenarios, and many community groups, including those from both Nottingham and McKinley, got involved.  There was a member of the McKinley community who believed she had found an error in the projections data that overestimated the number of excess seats at McKinley in the future, but the consultants hired by APS to do the projections disputed her methodology.  Nottingham jumped on board with the consultants in that fight, because the plan favored by the McKinley folks would have put Nottingham at 120% capacity after Discovery opened if the consultants were right and McKinley was wrong.

The end result was that the SB selected the proposal that they believed would best balance capacity, which included moving a planning unit that was at Tuckahoe at the time to McKinley rather than to Nottingham as they expected based on the 2013 decision.  At time time, it was believed this plan would put McKinley at about 100.73% capacity in 2016 when the projects would done, and Nottingham at 101.36% capacity.

Two things went wrong. First, the McKinley expansion took longer than expected due to unforeseen construction delays (they discovered an underground spring, and some utility lines that weren't properly mapped, and I think a third issue I can't remember), so there were all of these students moved in when the seats weren't ready.  Second, the projections used in 2014 were off, and McKinley ended up with more students than anticipated.  Nottingham ended up with fewer, but only by a handful of students (I believe they were at 94-96% capacity when Discovery opened in 2015, were back over capacity again by fall 2017, and had trailers the whole time).  McKinley ended up in a legitimately lousy situation, but their ire was particularly targeted at Nottingham even though other school groups were just as involved in the refinement process, seemingly because Nottingham was the most vocal on the projections issue and didn't side with McKinley.

Personally, I think McKinley got hosed in the whole thing (I don't know that anyone can really dispute that), but I think their anger with Nottingham is misplaced.  The consultants were the ones who made the error in the projections, not Nottingham, and if McKinley had been wrong about the numbers, McKinley's preferred scenario would have resulted in Nottingham being at least as overcapacity as McKinley claims is unacceptable now.  [/quote]

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