Reply to Patch article summarizing AAP Expansion vote

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
No, I am not a Haycock parent.  I was involved in the AAP restructuring issues and observed the "Haycock machine" in action.  You may have won, but you won ugly.  It's very dismissive to say there were just "some angry Cluster 2 parents" with a grievance.  This was a large group of families who themselves had a very reasonable case -- that they had as much right to stay at Haycock, that they and their children contributed to Haycock's reputation and community.  Of course, their presence and position was inconvenient to you, and you'd like to sugarcoat the fact you muscled out a group you targeted by appealing to anti-AAP sentiment and repeatedly implying that they were "other" and not really part of the school community.

Again, Strauss sounds reasonable to you because she's saying what you wanted to hear.  To me, she sounds smarmy, disingenuous and condescending.  I thought Schultz was right when she suggested that maybe Strauss should have done something about the Haycock situation long ago and not use this supposedly unpredictable crisis to justify making one particular segment of students suffer the worst consequences.[/quote]

What is smarmy and ugly is your referring to a "Haycock machine" comprised of parents who like other parents want the best for their children.

Of course, the Cluster 2 families had reasonable arguments, as they have indeed been part of the school community.  It may bother you that those arguments did not prevail, but they were presented and considered.  At the end of the day, the School Board made, by a 10-2 vote, a reasoned decision that the need to relieve the severe overcrowding at a school about to begin a renovation, the benefits of preserving a neighborhood school's base boundaries, and the benefits of reducing the ratio of AAP to GenEd classes in the upper grades at Haycock outweighed the competing and also reasonable arguments that students should be allowed to finish their education at the same school, particularly when moving them to a new school might mean that they had attended 3-4 elementary schools prior to middle school.

Would the first set of arguments prevail over the second if a similar situation might arise in the future?  Who knows?  Perhaps if Patty Reed had argued on behalf of the Cluster 2 families earlier or more forcefully, or if she had enlisted the staff's help sooner to flesh out alternatives so that people really could have understood the expense and logistics better, the outcome might have been different.  Maybe we conclude that Haycock's base boundaries should have been adjusted instead, and that it would be fine if, in the future, there were not two but three times as many AAP as GenEd classes at Haycock.  I really don't know, but I think people with different interests had a chance to state their cases here and one position prevailed when presented to a 12-person body that included members with different backgrounds.  Indeed, Ryan McElveen, who attended Cluster 2 schools and graduated from Marshall, supported Strauss's motion and opposed Schultz's.

As for the claim that Janie should have "done more" earlier to prevent the overcrowding at Haycock, you need to decide whether she has too much power or too little.  It would be nice if she could snap her hands and get new schools built overnight, but the increase in Haycock's enrollment this past year was larger than anyone anticipated, and we ultimately sit in the renovation/construction queue like everyone else.  [/quote]

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