Reply to The demise of McKinley ES (APS)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is McKinley really complaining? Really?

After complaining for years about the overcrowding, now they are complaining that there's a solution?! Priceless.[/quote]

No, most people aren't complaining, at least not about the move to Reed. What people are upset about is that APS is representing that the McKinley building got picked as a choice school because &quot;McKinley can move as a whole to Reed&quot; when the data doesn't support that fact. You can't open Reed, Glebe, and Ashlawn at full capacity with no room to grow and leave 350-369 empty seats spread among Tuckahoe, Jamestown, Nottingham, and Discovery. When the boundaries are drawn, every school but Jamestown is going to need to shift planning units north under this plan if the school buildings are really going to be fully utilized. Just do the math based on what APS put out and you can see what NW schools have empty space to take more kids under both proposals (hint: Jamestown and Discovery).

And if you are a diversity advocate, you should be upset about this proposal too, because it effectively seals up the N/S divide in elementary schools. Without McKinley as a neighborhood school, there is no way that you can ever draw a N/S ES school boundary, because every seat in Ashlawn is going to be needed to address the population needs of the central-west section of the county that are being lost by using both ATS and McKinley as option sites.  [/quote]
I think the thought is to put more VPI in the NW to increase diversity.  
Also, people shouldn't get too hung up on the fact that the schools seem a little imbalanced by the spreadsheet they sent out.  The spread sheet is very back of the envelope, and that part isn't being voted on until next spring.  Other than things that are clearly written on the wall (the ashlawn bounary won't follow the orange line so much, most of current asfs will move to key neighborhood, etc.), its not worth getting bent out of shape.
Would you rather they have the no moves map?[/quote]

No, I think they need moves, and I think they need to balance capacity. But if you are going to be busing kids up to NW (to the tune of 350-370 kids) to create diversity, should those be preschool kids, or should they be K-5 kids? Preschool kids do not interact with the K-5 population, so its kind of smoke and mirrors to put a bunch of 4 years olds on a bus from South Arlington to Jamestown so that you can make the schools look more diverse. Personally, I think they should model what it would look like to level out K-5 enrollment numbers consistently across all school buildings (so that we don't have some schools with 700+ K-5 kids, and others with &lt;500 K-5 kids) and then you can move the preschoolers to fill out the larger buildings. They should also look at option school locations from that perspective. [/quote]
I think VPI kids have the option to stay at the school when they enter kindergarten assuming its not overcrowded.  VPI is another way to increase diversity,  [/quote]

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