Reply to MPSA - new school or move to north Arlington?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]The existing CC building has to be renovated after the new HS is built. That will cost tens of millions of dollars. $40? $50?[/b] APS is not talking about that yet.

MPSA is going to be torn down. You could leave it on the site during construction, then renno, then move it to the old building. But that takes at least 5 years, and it also means the construction for the new building will be much harder and stupider, because they will spend $1 million building MPSA a new play area they plan to destroy, and they will build a half field instead of a full field, and the bus loop won't be optimized, etc.

They absolutely should move MPSA north now. It doesn't matter where, we have the seats, use them. Make the construction make more sense now.

Then in 5 years when you are renovating the old building, we will know what we need it for. It may be another neighborhood school in S Arlington, where they are building new multi-story family buildings at a crazy pace. Or if north Arlington has some magical growth they could move MPSA back at that point.

That's what makes the most sense.

I don't know what MPSA actually wants. [/quote]

APS had proposals that said the expansion of the Career Center would be around $170-200 million for what they want. [/quote]

This has all been very hard to follow. But APS is spending $170-200 million on a brand new building. The existing building will be left on the site, and needs to be renovated for some other purpose when CC moves out. That cost is probably $40-60 million IN ADDITION TO the $170-200 million for the new building. Plus whatever it costs to tear down MPSA, which won't be much.

But again, if we are tearing MPSA down anyhow, and we have 500 empty ES seats now (which we do) we should just move MPSA now and figure out later on what to do with the old CC space. I don't think MPSA has to go there, and by that time, we may need a new ES in SA.[/quote]

Nope. We don’t need to spend any more $$ right now. They can sit tight in the building we just spent a couple million on for another 5 years or so. It’s not like they’re tearing it down now. It’s years away. Also, this is in the same walk zone as Fleet so this isn’t where we might need a new ES in South Arlington. [/quote]

Why would it cost money to move them? [b]We just need to do boundary adjustments[/b], and then we basically have an empty ES in North Arlington, right? If we keep them onsite during construction, we dump another million into that site to move the MPSA playground which we now know is going to get torn down in a few years. Plus, keeping them means we build the bus lane and small field now, and then later on we tear that all up and do it again with the full site. So much wasted $.

And yes, it's close to Fleet, but have you seen the housing plans on Columbia Pike? There are 4-5 new multi-story buildings being built within blocks of there.[/quote]

this is delusional - that's only true if you treat "N Arlington" as one blob, and not realize that there are multiple ES there. the "empty seats" are scattered, so you'd have to really distort boundaries to make it work, and you'd end up with overcrowding somewhere anyway just due to geography.[/quote]

[i]Distort [/i]boundaries? There is no difference between north Arlington elementary schools and those schools are all about a mile apart. Really. No one cares about the tiny differences among these schools or their boundaries except for a small group of parents for a few years while their kids are there. Move the boundaries and in two years [i]no one[/i] will care. [/quote]

+1. Arlington is too small to really "distort" any boundaries. The last process I followed, which was painful, the upshot is that no community is happy to be moved, and there are no perfect solutions. But across a handful of schools in N Arlington that are reasonably close to one another we have the equivalent of 500 seats. So why not do the shuffle and move MPSA now? I agree we will otherwise just burn a bunch more dead money on this site.[/quote]

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