Reply to APS Boundary tool--anyone get it to work yet?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Let's start with the idea of moving the southern most Western Pike units to Wakefield, and then bridge the Yorktown island.  These very simple changes fix the capacity problems.  They are completely consistent with 5 out of 6 criteria, but demographic diversity gets worse.

Any of the many alternatives that improve demographics harms the other criteria, since there are no more demographic minorities near Yorktown or W-L (the schools, not the current borders) that can be absorbed.

APS has already taken three explicit measures to increase demographic diversity:
1) The Yorktown island,
2) The Western Pike into W-L, and
3) The Eastern Pike into W-L (4828 and surrounding) and northern central pike to Wakefield (4690 and surrounding).

All three of these already violate the other criteria by being non-contiguous, disrupting walk zones, being farther away, etc.

So, bottom line, there are 6 criteria, but it's basically demographics vs. all the rest, and our current situation strikes a balance between them all.

The problem is that demographics are not just unbalanced across the county but getting worse.  As this happens, balancing of demographics will incur an increasing penalty on the other criteria, putting a downward pressure on the education experience across the county that balances the gains from diversity.

Although I sympathize with those in Wakefield who don't want higher FARMs rates, I also sympathize with those from W-L and Yorktown who like their status quo.  The question at the county level is whether moving FARMs around can increase the overall quality of the schools or if doing so helps one (Wakefield) at the expense of the others.

[b]There is a lot of research touting the benefits to low income students of being around higher income students.  The scant research on the effects to the higher income students suggests that they suffer as a result.[/b]  So, this feels like a zero-sum game of who can most effectively push out the low income students.

If we had a better socio-economic balance across the county, these problems would go away.  Unfortunately, we don't, and the school board has the challenge of dealing with the existing demographic distribution.

My thought is to do the smallest fix now to address overcrowding, but start thinking about 4 years from now for a comprehensive solution that includes a new high school.[/quote]

No kid at Yorktown is going to "suffer" if there are 100 more low-income students there. That is just complete BS. [/quote]

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