Reply to APS Elementary Location Working Group 4/12

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Serious questions here from a Nottingam parent who gets the implications of these questions for our own school but is going to ask anyway (because I’ve been reading this thread all along and still don’t feel like I have a handle on the answers):

1. For those who want Key to remain at its current location, what is APS supposed to do for neighborhood students in its area, especially considering that fewer of them will be able to Key than have attended previously? Do you expect ASFS to stay outside of its zone while students immediately around it go elsewhere? Will the planning units around Key get zoned for other schools? How do you expect to see that division occur?

2. For those who want a Key/ASFS swap, I’d ask essentially the same question - where do you expect all of the students around ASFS to go? What will those boundaries look like?

For all of the debate and advocacy around these ideas, I’m having a hard time envisioning how it would work in practice to keep the immersion program at either location while stil providing the necessary neighborhood seats, but maybe there’s something I’m overlooking. I know people will be inclined to take these questions as a springboard for other positions only tangentially related, but I’d appreciate it if I could get some serious and direct answers to these questions from people who hold these positions before that happens.[/quote]

These are really questions you should be addressing to the school board.[/quote]

Why? The SB has not yet made a determination on this either way, but maybe they don’t see it either. Right now I’m talking to the parents who are advocating for these outcomes, how do they see it actually working? How are you going to convince me to sign your petition? To support your side when I go to office hours or send an email to the staff/SB?[/quote]

Who, outside of this thread, and, outside of this thread, some parents concerned about rumors, is discussing these changes?  I have seen no explanation from the school board.  The only tangible concern I recall reading about was an online petition from over a year ago from a ASFS parent who indicated concern about Key becoming an option school and ASFS potentially having to take in hundreds of new students.  [/quote]

umm- there is an engage effort on this?  This is not just rumor and fear mongering- changing elementary school locations is a real thing.

To the person asking what Key parents say- here are the reasons I have been given (and I am a Key parent)
1. ask the school board-- they actually mean this, they view it as not their problem.
2. Give neighborhood preference again, the whole problem is that they took away Key neighborhood preference, it was working fine.  I think this answer is total BS and it actually really irritates me.  It was working fine for THEM- b/c they had the choice of two schools.  It was not working fine for the rest of Arlington.

I don't think anyone at Key wants to swap with ASFS, and I think there is very little incentive for this (doesn't mean it won't happen.)   It doesn't create more seats in that corner of the county.[/quote]

This is what I'm getting so frustrated with in this process, and that's not limited to the Key/ASFS area, it's all of us everywhere. Everyone is clinging to their ideal solution for them, and very few people have thus far shown a willingness to come up with a realistic second choice if they can't have their ideal. The staff and the SB may have their agendas that they haven't shared and they may already have ideas about what the solutions should be, but the staff and SB also have a significant incentive to get through this process with as little strife and conflict as possible. That's what ultimately happened with middle school boundaries, staff/SB were looking for ways to make them more balanced but everyone was dug in so hard on what they wanted for themselves that they eventually gave up, let everyone have their way and the people who fought so hard for themselves ended up screwed in a different way instead. Do we really want to repeat that?

I think if we as a community could give the staff/SB some compromise options that we agreed to accept, lots of us could end up better off than we otherwise might if the staff has to find the compromise solution themselves without our input. So, for instance, for the Key families who want immersion to stay at Key, what's your second choice? If APS says the immersion program has to move because there will be such a drastic shortage of neighborhood seats in that area otherwise, where would you want to go instead, and what could APS realistically offer you at that site that would make it more palatable to you? P.S., the answer can't be to move to ASFS, because that does nothing to address the neighborhood capacity crisis APS would be trying to address.

Same goes for Nottingham (which is my school, so I have a better sense of what some second-choice proposals could be). Obviously our community has spoken out that we largely don't want our school made an option site. But since it may happen anyway, it would be great if we as a community could form some kind of consensus on a second choice we could offer APS that we would agree not to fight if they agreed to our requests. As for what those requests might be, I'm thinking things like

* A balanced split of our population north of Lee Highway between Tuckahoe and Discovery (this can include Reed as well if there's a sensible way to do that) so you don't end up with 80% of the neighborhood at Tuckahoe and then the remaining student who go to Discovery are cut off from most of their friends. Give our staff some opportunities either to stay at Nottingham with the program that comes in or to transfer to Tuckahoe or Discovery (yes, I know that means some of the staff at the other schools leaving), both for continuity for the students changing schools and out of respect for the numerous Nottingham staff members who live in the neighborhood and walk to work, so they're not forced into a cross-county commute after investing in a home so close to their jobs.

* Work with the county to fix the road situation on Little Falls right on the block right in front of the school so that you don't have the road narrowing for just that block with bike riders merging into car traffic at the same time people are trying to cross the street while parked cars are opening their doors into traffic, and then put a bunch of buses and additional cars there as well. Either widen the road to continue the bike line through that block and have it as a buffer between the parking and travel lanes, or eliminate street parking along that block, widen the travel lanes and add back bike lanes.

* Commit to staggering the start times so that Discovery and Tuckahoe keep their 9 am start times but the Nottingham site will change to am 8:25 start time so that you don't have students walking out of the neighborhood to Tuckahoe or Discovery at the same time you're bringing ten extra buses and 80 extra cars into tertiary neighborhood roads.

* Put crosswalks and a crossing guard at 26th and Ohio to help with safe transit for walkers to Tuckahoe.

* Commit to a safety review of the Williamsburg/Harrison intersection post-transition to assess for any additional safety measures needed to accommodate the increase in both both walker traffic and vehicular traffic that will happen at that intersection.

* Do not jam those schools as full as possible in expectation of the elementary-age population dropping because while the staff keeps predicting this, they also keep turning out to be wrong, and it seems like every other year we're fighting for a fourth kindergarten class that APS finally concedes we need sometime in July or August when the stragglers finally register. If you're going to take away our most flexible neighborhood school, give us a little breathing room (just a percent or two) for your predictions to be wrong.

What I'd really love is if the NW (not just Tuckahoe, Nottingham and Discovery but also McKinley, future Reed, Ashlawn and Barrett) could all come together, accept that someone is going to become a neighborhood school, and come up with a compromise proposal for the region that we think is the best solution and agree not to fight the county over if they work with us on our requests. But that's a pipe dream right now.[/quote]

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