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]Ok, so assuming they make Key a neighborhood school and move the immersion school, where are the possible relocation sites?  Projected at over 800 students for next year, ASFS is a nonstarter.  I’m asking with genuine curiosity because I haven’t seen anything realistic or geographically appropriate suggested.  No matter how much folks resent choice schools, they play an important role in alleviating crowding in other schools and you need to house them somewhere.  That “somewhere” will always be in somebody’s neighborhood.  [/quote]

Since it’s full lottery now, that projection isn’t valid anymore. If I understand correctly, that projection was assuming they would have to take anyone who registered from Key zone, which is no longer the case. A lottery option school can control its total population.[/quote]

Key currently has just under 740 kids.  4 classes of 5th grade kids will graduate removing about 100 kids from the school taking it down to 640, however you need to add in about 150 kids for the incoming Kinder taking it up to 790; give or take a few kids.
The lottery yielded enough applicants to fill a 6 class Kindergarten.

So year 800 is still an accurate projection. 
[/quote]
That's assuming you need to have to have that many kids period though -- you could only have 4 kindergarten classes instead (or take the number of native speakers applicants and add in the same number of non-native speakers).  I've heard they've had a very hard time getting that many native speakers, so assuming you try to keep the 50/50 split, you might only have 3 kindergarten classes.  Before they had to take whomeever wanted to attend from the neighborhood (which was roughly 40% of the school, most of whom were not native speakers according to APS last spring).  So you can easily shrink it a class if you keep it at its current location since there aren't as many native spanish speakers applying.  You move it, maybe there are more speakers that need to be accommodated and it needs to say the size it is.  [/quote]

66 native Spanish speakers applied so even if APS decided not to fill all 72 seats and only match the 66 we would still need more than 5 classes (66x2 = 132/24 = 5.5 classes required). The lottery isn't going to shrink the program the way some feared (I admit I was skeptical myself).  The only way to shrink the program will be to restrict the class size going forward.

[/quote]

Restricting the program size based on the available seats is how all of the option programs work. Every single other option program has a waitlist because there aren't enough seats for all of the applicants. The only reason Key has been an exception in recent history is because APS had no other place to put those kids, it was tapped out on seats.[/quote]

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