Reply to Why is there always some kind of issue/concern/problem with TJ?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why has there never been a serious discussion about changing TJ to an Academy where any student can take classes?

Or even follow the LCPS model of 1/2 base school and 1/2 magnet program?  It makes so much more sense to spread out a limited resource.  [/quote]

Because changing it to an Academy would only serve a larger number of students if you rebuilt about 2/3 of the present school building at an enormous cost.[/quote]

This seems like a made up assertion.  Even if, for example, kids weren’t taking gym at an Academy program, the gym could still be retained and made available for local community use.[/quote]

If TJ became an academy, it would only house STEM classes - so if you had an A/B schedule where the students were at their base school for their non-STEM classes, they'd come in and take math, science, some sort of tech class (D&T or CS or something) and then perhaps an elective.

The purpose-built STEM classrooms that exist currently at TJ are full - it's not like they're sitting empty for any significant period of time during the day except maybe an occasional one. Many are shared between two teachers so that capacity can be maximized, especially since the class size was increased with the new admissions process.

The only STEM topic that most of the current non-STEM classrooms could actually support is math, because they were built so small. You'd have to tear those down and re-size and re-outfit most of those rooms in order to convert them into additional biology, chemistry, physics, design and tech rooms or senior techlabs. You can't just take Mr. Struck's old history classroom and put Robotics in there.

This is why the Academy conversation is a non-starter. The time to make that change was before they completely renovated the school at a cost of over $100M to the taxpayers.

TJ is what it is, the school's physical plant cannot support any other type of school (including a neighborhood school) without massive additional renovations, and people need to get used to it and stop trying to change what it is.[/quote]

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