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[quote=Anonymous][quote=ChenLing][quote=Anonymous]
Appreciate the post; but disagree it is helpful. 
Chen Ling, do you know the answer to why APS spends more per student? (There's some discussion and explanation on an AEM thread)
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We spend about 20% more than our neighbors. About half of that is debt service -- we pay out the bonds used for CIP using our operating funds. For FY25 we'll be paying $67.3 million, which is close to our statutory maximum. The other 10% is actually rather odd -- adjusted for student population,  we have similar class sizes, student-teacher ratios, number of schools, and transportation costs. I thought that our teachers were more tenured (and so are higher on the step scale), but since we pay our teachers less, it actually almost exactly evens out.

The "the board doesn't understand why we pay more" is a quote from a current board member.

[quote=Anonymous]And what are your skills that you bring? What are your positions on various policies? What are your thoughts on instruction? [/quote]

I encourage you to visit my website: [url]https://chen4arlington.org[/url] :)
If you have a more specific question, I'd be happy to answer it in this forum.

[quote=Anonymous]How would you manage boundaries/enrollment across schools?[/quote]

I'll answer this question in two parts -- one for criteria and one about planning.

You can read the current APS policy here: [url]https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/arlington/Board.nsf/files/AZ2V3D5FA2B8/$file/B-2.1%20Boundaries.pdf[/url].
They don't follow this policy. There are planning units that get split off from most of their peers when going from elementary to middle, and split off again from their peers when they move again to high school. There are those (in the current MS boundary proposal) who can see their current MS from their house but will now be bussed to a school further away.

It's possible that this actually makes sense, but that is not communicated to the community. What I want to see is clearer criteria -- how are conflicts between different considerations resolved, what it means to be "small groups of students", etc. And I want to see the different proposals that are considered, and how each proposal is measured against the published criteria. As a parent, if you're doing something that affects my child, I want to know that the decision was actually well thought out and defensible.

For planning, it really gets intermingled with how APS does planning factors (e.g., you have this many students so you get 2.2 Music teachers and 1.8 counselors). Because you can't hire fractional people (most of the time), principals do swaps. They get 2 music teachers, 1 counselor, and can get another special ed teacher that they desperately need. What should happen is a Monte Carlo simulation of possible future enrollments to determine two things: (1) thresholds where we can't serve the student population properly without adding additional staff -- i.e., there is a 70% chance that we'll have X students which will require Y classes which will in turn require an addition set of PE/Music/Art teachers, and (2) optimal configurations which will be the least likely to require future boundary changes.[/quote]

Appreciate you answering each question specifically - and in this forum, rather than just referring to your website.
I hope you will consider the idea that the APS boundary policy itself is a problem and consider, if starting from a blank slate with no policy, how APS can most effectively balance enrollment across schools and provide classroom environments and experiences as comparable as possible across the system.

Similarly, if our schools are not going to be comparable across the system (ie demographics and level of student needs), please think about what planning factors would actually give the schools in most need the teacher resources they need to serve their students and most effectively close (narrow as much as possible) gaps.

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