Reply to APS: Think the "no move" campaign is going to work?

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Reply to "APS: Think the "no move" campaign is going to work?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The county should reclaim community centers. Better to have smaller, well-distributed elementary schools than places for seniors to do yoga.

Build them a fancy community center at Quincy and take back the community centers. [/quote]

There are a lot of base costs associated with a school, so having a lot of smaller schools eats up budget. (They all have to have a principal, asst principal, librarian, etc.) A lot of positions don't scale well. The schools that were turned into community centers are a LOT smaller than most schools now. And the costs to bring them up to speed are a lot -- they are spending $25M just to convert the former H-B building, which hadn't been updated in 50 years even though it was functioning as a school building for 700 kids, to make it a modern middle school. It's not like $5M to convert an existing building, it's closer to the cost of building new.

If there were easy solutions, they would do them. Discovery was the only easy one where APS owned a huge piece of land and the boundaries for all of the neighboring schools were demographically the same. Reed is the only easy-to-convert building and people are losing their *#&@ over boundaries. APS owned the Wilson building and look how hard it was to figure out what to put there and then how many complaints there have been about what they ended up doing. And again, it took them an extra year or two to get the neighborhood to let them build Fleet next to TJ because the County owned part of the parcel, and then people went nuts over moving boundaries in south Arlington.

The amount of energy people spend arguing over this stuff and complaining about staff and yelling at each other. There is no good solution. There is rarely a better solution. There are choices between not-great solutions that will make kids have to change schools and make families have to change their arrangements, and maybe leave some schools overcrowded for a while and maybe make some undercrowded for a while. All we are debating is which ones, and no answer is the right answer.

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Yes, there are cost barriers to this solution which is why it will never happen. But generally smaller, well-distributed elementary schools are better for kids/families.
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