Reply to APS middle school boundary process

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]TBF to the school board, they are stuck with a basically immutable set of crappy circumstances - small county, limited county ownership of land, high private land prices, ballooning school population, relatively low tax base, relatively low % of ppl willing to support increased taxes (due to the low % of residents with children in the schools), and the existing AH layout. If they don't want to show up to meetings and say, essentially, yup it all sucks and we can't really do anything about it, then they have to trot out lines like "all APS schools are excellent" and "shift scheduling could be appealing to some students." Whether they now believe their own lines (cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing), I can't say.[/quote]

There are intractable problems, and the County Board's failure to take the long view or to show some spine or credit residents with being open to reasoned argument is part of the problem (when people raised objections to the streetcar, the Board hired a PR firm rather than explaining why our streetcar would work better than Portland's, for example).

But the biggest problem, as I see it, is a Reaganesque refusal to speak ill of other Board members, unless you're Nancy Van Doren, and let's all hope you're not, because one is more than enough. So we are stuck with a crappy superintendent and his crappy, expensive decisions, and that creates budgetary problems that mean we can't afford to do basic, proven things that would help and instead go for the shiny. And no one is willing to tell parents that if their biggest problem is that their kid's in a trailer, they don't actually have any problems, that if you want one type of school to start later, you're going to have to have other schools starting earlier, that there's a difference between not liking paying for extended day and having extended day costs cut into your fun money, that their job is to provide a quality education to all kids, and if a choice does that, too bad about any tiny ding to the increase in your property values. [/quote]

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