Reply to South Arlington elementary school boundary adjustments 2019

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Maybe I’m reading that wrong, but that 65% have a member of their family living in Arlington. Am I understanding that correctly?[/quote]
No you are not reading it correctly.  It says adult member of the household.  Theoretically, there could be a new adult member of the household who lives outside of Arlington who moves into the household.  I'm sure this happens occasionally- that there is a new adult member of the household from outside Arlington- but I doubt that it is a frequent occurrence because it is difficult to qualify for AH if you have 2 working adults in the household.
There is a person or group of people on this board who firmly believe that there is a grand conspiracy in Arlington to attract poor people into Arlington and that the "AH Lobby' is somehow profiting from this- and that AH is the reason why schools have poorer outcomes.
I strongly disagree both as a factual matter and a matter of philosophy, and I worry about this getting repeated so often that others began to believe it too.
First- as a matter of philosophy, I think it is unacceptable to try and drive lower income people out of Arlington (I could go into reasons why- but I don't want to derail.)
Second- if you accept the first point, AH is a good good thing.  Living in affordable housing (as compared to market rate affordable housing) dramatically improves schools and school outcomes.  
The biggest way you see this is in the dramatic reduction of turnover.  Here is a sheet with facts about turnover of AH as compared to market rate affordable housing- 
https://arlingtonva.s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2014/02/Turnover-in-CAFs-August-2014.pdf

That improves schools because kids stay in the same school for longer, instead of moving around constantly.  
It also reduces overcrowding.  AH has a lot more controls.  Reducing overcrowding also improves school outcomes.  i am thinking in particular of one family I am familiar with- They were Arlington residents the whole time.  Before they got a CAF, they were stuffing into a 1 bdrm with multiple people- at one point I think they had 6 people living in a 1 bdrm apartment.  The kids never got enough sleep b/c of the overcrowding.  Now they have an appropriately sized CAF the kids are sleeping more and their school performance has dramatically improved.

I'm curious if anyone who is so critical of AH and is sure that people are living in it fraudulently has  ever tried to apply, or helped someone apply.  The amount of documentation that has to be submitted and paperwork reqmts is ridiculous.  [/quote]

DP here. I understand and tend to agree with you on benefits of CAFs. However, I don't understand the need for concentrated CAFs (or for concentrating it all in South Arl, but that's an issue apparently way beyond any of us to solve). What about mixed buildings? Seems to me that the strain on infrastructure, particularly schools, and the potential to ghettoize is worse when you set it up this way. Plus, if the whole idea is that our community is economically diverse, shouldn't we try to rub elbows from time to time rather than basically setting up parallel communities? We used to live in a mixed income building in NYC, so that's more my frame of reference. What am I missing? [/quote]

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