Reply to APS Elementary Location Working Group 4/12

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

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)
[b]1. ask the school board-- they actually mean this, they view it as not their problem.[/b]
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]

I'm in the Key neighborhood boundaries with a preschooler and a baby, so I am definitely rooting for a neighborhood school at Key. It is frustrating to hear from some of the advocates to keep immersion at Key who are talking about how vital it is to keep the school in it's current location because of the poor Hispanic students who will be gravely endangered by a move - while conveniently ignoring the fact that those families no longer have a right to attend the school as it stands. Yes, they can apply and will probably get in, but the most disadvantaged are the ones least likely to jump through the hoops. As for rest of the (majority not Hispanic) neighborhood, they just DGAF. All of the explanations for why it needs to be immersion hinge on it being a neighborhood school... which it is not![/quote]

Samesies.  As a future parent looking in, I'm of course biased in that I'd love my kids' future neighborhood school to be closer rather than farther away (as it seems most families do).  It's hard for me to see why families in the current Key boundary would want to stay at ASFS rather than move to Key other than (1) status quo bias [and the not insignificant hassle to staff to relocate--fair enough], and (2) the science lab?  I have not seen this science lab, but as a future ES parent, I'll take a school I don't have to drive to over some beakers any day.

I also find it sort of crazy that folks in parts of the county with schools super close together are freaking out as much as they are about losing one of their several neighborhood sites (and that the school board is worried about students in a "corner" of the county not having any options--looking at Tuckahoe, here) when everyone is Rosslyn is way farther away even from Key--to say nothing of how far they are from ASFS, Taylor, etc.  Rosslyn appears to be the "corner" of the county with reason to complain about not having proximate neighborhood options.  No real dog in the Rosslyn plight, except that the unfairness of the analysis is annoying to me; I live toward Court House.[/quote]

I don't think there are very many ASFS parents that want the school to stay where it is and I think the majority of people want the community to stay together which would having a neighborhood school at key would pretty much guarantee.  Most asfs parents zoned for the school have been largely absent from the discussion -- there's been a lot of engagement from the asfs parents who live in cherrydale, but that is a minority in the school (only 10-15 kids live in that walk zone currently attend the school, its really maybe 10 families total).

The way its been presented to us is that changing locations will result in the end of the science program (which I'm not 100% convinced of personally, but you had people like the science teacher saying that at last weeks school board meeting) and that it could potentially kill the immersion program.  There are holes in both of those arguments (the science curriculum can be moved if we stop being married to the building, I'm not sure that there are a large number of native speakers around key and they removed the neighborhood preference so it shouldn't matter where its located).  But you can see why most parents would be concerned and if its presented that way would want to maintain the status quo.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a good out of the box solution here.  A neighborhood school at key makes sense because it seems like there needs to be a non-option school in that neighborhood given the number of kids that live there and APS current monetary issues.  But we don't want that to come at the expense of the immersion program, and the other school sites (Long Branch and ASFS) would involve rezoning many many kids in order to make them contiguous with the existing key zone.

I wish the staff hadn't drawn it out so much.  I appreciate them trying to make a good decision, but it seems like its just feeding hysteria at this point.  
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