Reply to APS - First Career Center Concept

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "APS - First Career Center Concept"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote]So 5 year olds can walk up to a mile to get to school (according to APS) but grown adult teachers can't walk 1/2 mile from their car? And plenty of people in this area don't get free parking right on site at their place of work. Doesn't anyone else here work in downtown DC? I realize there are better transit options downtown, but the vast majority of DC workers still drive every day. They just pay to park in garages near-ish their offices or get lucky and find a spot on the street.

tl/dr: Why is Gutshall's email a big deal?[/quote]

1. This isn't a particularly centrally located area, it is no where near a metro.  The bus rides up Columbia pike can be long and cumbersome with frequent stops.  Bus service along Columbia Pike has been decreased. And the county/Army are about to rip up the road between the Pentagon and Columbia pike as part of the cemetery expansion. Bottom line commuting via public transportation will be too time consuming to be a viable option for many.

2.  Many teacher and staff don't live in Arlington (can't afford to) and could not easily commute via public transportation even if they wanted to.  We are talking teachers who live in Loudoun County, in Maryland, in Prince William County. These people don't want to add 20 -30 minutes to their day circling the neighborhood looking for parking and then walking to the school.  
Teachers often have to carry lots of papers/heavy things back and forth between their class and their car. 
Lack of dedicated parking impacts their willingness to work at specific schools.  Lack of parking negatively impacts teacher retention and hiring. This has already been an issue at Fleet for the same reason.

3. Other Arlington schools do offer parking.  So teachers can take a job at Fleet or the CCHS just to get in the door with APS and then request a transfer to another Arlington school that does offer parking.  This imposes higher turnover rate, less experienced teachers and less teacher stability on the students of those schools compared to the rest of the County.

4. Substitute teachers are at a premium and won't work at schools that don't offer parking. Again this is already a problem at Fleet. What will the school do without a viable pool of subs.  How will that impact student instruction.
 
5.  There isn't alot of neighborhood parking and that particular neighborhood also has to absorb parking from Fleet which was purposely built under parked, TJ Middle School and  TJ Community Center. The site in question is the Career Center High School, Montessori Elementary school and a County Library.  There is not enough street parking in that neighborhood to absorb parking from 4 different schools and 2 different community buildings. So where will people go?

6. The entire concept of CTE requires kids to be able to get from their other school to the CCHS and then back to their home school during the day. Some parents have said that the bus schedule does not work to make the classes they want/need and they wait until their kids are driving age and able to go back and forth between the Career center and their home high school via their own transportation. Removing parking serves as a barrier to kids attending CTE classes.

7.  Arlington Tech is hemorrhaging kids who cannot make their class schedule and busing work to get back to their home school for extra curricular, music, and sports. Some kids are willing to suck it up and stay until they are able to drive under the belief that it will be easier once they can drive. If the logistics of going to school there don't allow kids to participate in activities at their home school for the whole of their high school experience, less kids are going to volunteer to go to school there.

8.  teachers and students could possible park in private garages for a fee.  This imposes a cost on teachers and students only at that school vs. additional availability at other schools. Again students and teachers have the option to move elsewhere and will over something like an imposed extra cost.

The entire concept of the Career Center is based on the idea that over a thousand kids will willingly attend the school.  If there is no parking, its hard to get to, you have no realistic access to sports, music, extracurricular because you can't actually get back to your home school, the teachers are constantly turning over, leaving for other schools, and unable to build up unique programs due to lack of continuity, who is going to go there??

If Arlington spends millions on a bet that 2,000 kids are willing to go there and they aren't, what happens?  Who gets forced there? Or have we spent ridiculous amounts of money on a school that sits half empty with constant teacher turnover cause the county can't force anyone to attend/work there. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics