Reply to Transfers in Arl. at elementary level

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]You don't need to be over capacity to need trailers. Once you hit 95% capacity, and potentially even lower, you end up needing trailers. [b]To ensure that McKinley wouldn't need trailers for the reasonably foreseeable future despite population growth (and building in a buffer for changes in residence patterns), and to avoid the need to reshuffle students between schools every year to accomplish that, the county would need to take capacity of McKinley down to probably around 80%.[/b] Where are you going to put those 150+ students, especially without creating an even greater need for trailers elsewhere?[/quote]

Excuse me, this sounds very much like you are making things up.  I think you are saying that a school basically must either put an entire grade level outside in trailers or none at all and nothing else will do, and I have learned that there are many other options to make more classrooms within a school.  For example, a school can have roving specials classes, where for example the Spanish or Art teacher comes to the kids instead of the kids coming to them.  The 80% capacity is your made up number, not reality, and NOBODY is asking for your strawman 80% capacity.[/quote]

I think you're missing my point. If we assume that population is going to grow over time (which is why we're in this fix to begin with, so I don't think we can take it out of the picture), and we want a solution that doesn't just get rid of trailers for McKinley for a year or two and doesn't involve rebalancing schools every year, we need to give enough of a buffer *today* to allow McKinley to grow down the road. Yes, 80% isn't a figure based on any specific study, but I certainly hope you at least recognize that we can't put McKinley at 95% capacity today, and expect that this would even eliminate trailers today, let alone in five years.

I also think you're very dismissive of the limiting impact roving classes has on the ability of specials teachers to teach effectively.[/quote]

But you are missing MY point.  I said it's worse for a bigger school to have trailers than a smaller school so we should try to reduce the bigger school's numbers, and you responded that wasn't feasible because we'd need to find a home for 150 kids!  So in effect we don't need to reduce McKinley's overcapacity because of your made up 80% figure, since there will be trailers anyway.  But that need not be true.  And throwing your hands up in the air and saying the problem is too hard doesn't fix the injustice of an already huge school being overcapacity with no green space.

Re my dismissiveness, I've seen a roving Spanish class and it seemed great to me.  They spent less time being ferried to and from their specials class and the teacher did a great job with it.  I think [b]you're[/b] very dismissive of what having a 750 kid overcapacity elementary school with no field space might feel like to a young kid.[/quote]

No, that's not what I said. I realize it's hard to put all of the strands together because we're all posting as Anonymous, but what I've said through this thread is that I think the boundaries should stay as they are, because even though I agree that McKinley will be overcrowded next year and that sucks, if you look just a couple of years after that, the numbers are expected to go down for McKinley while going up for every other school it's been suggested they could go to instead, so you're not really fixing the problem. You're just saying you want it to suck for someone other than you. Of course no one wants to be the person it sucks for, but you really haven't offered a compelling argument for why it should be a different school. Yes, I know McKinley's capacity will be greater, but do you really think that they rebalance it so that McKinley has no trailers in it's green space, but a school with smaller capacity is now at 140% capacity again (which Nottingham and Tuckahoe were at times before the rebalancing), they get more trailers and have no green space, that somehow that will be just fine because the absolute numbers would be less? I'm sure you're not that disingenuous.

Since rebalancing every year isn't a plausible solution, I think the best approach is to look at the longer-term projections of student population, and choosing the boundaries that best balance the current number with what they're expected to be in five and ten years. Hopefully in ten years the board will be largely done with this round of expanding at the middle and high school levels, will come back around to the elementary schools, develop another expansion strategy if needed, and then once again try to balance the student populations both in the immediate term and the longer term.
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