Reply to APS - new CIP proposal

Forum Index » VA Public Schools other than FCPS

Reply to "APS - new CIP proposal"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Getting back to the new CIP - I'm looking back at when we got into this Career Center mess.  Details are all here:  https://www.apsva.us/instruction/new-high-school/

It was [b]four years ago[/b] -  June 2017 - that the School Board voted on the very last minute "hybrid plan" to put some of the 1300 new HS seats at the Ed Center and some at the CC.  The documents show that they planned 500-600 seats at Ed Center to open most likely before 2022, and 700-800 new HS at the CC to open by Fall 2022.  This was instead of building a 1300 seat HS at Kenmore, the option with the most land and the longest term growth potential.  And these new CC seats were supposed to be in addition to the 600 seats already planned for Arlington Tech.

So we were supposed to have 1300-1400 CC seats built out by Fall 2022.  Instead, we had years of planning commissions trying to figure out how to make this work and how much it would cost.  That ended in disaster last spring when the costs where way too high and the neighborhood rejected a school without full facilities, including a pool.

So now, APS puts out this very roughly sketched out plan for up to 1800 MS and HS seats at this site by 2026, with no details about what program(s) this would be, how they will fit, what facilities they will have, etc.

How are we not right back where we started four years ago?  And the poor Arlington Tech students still have no facility improvements, right?  [i]If we are going back to the beginning, can we please, pretty please reconsider Kenmore now??[/i][/quote]

If we are reviewing history, note the reason the neighborhood was insisting on full features is because up until a week ago, APS would never publicly commit to these not being neighborhood HS seats. So if you live in this neighborhood, APS was saying, hey, we can zone you to this school and you have to go here, even though it may be a very different school from our other comprehensive HSs.

But I agree, this whole process is half-baked.[/quote]

No criticism of the neighborhood intended.  Just trying to point out that after a four year, exhaustive process, a successful solution for this property was not determined.  And yet, now the CIP is putting all its eggs in this basket again.  Could we please consider other choices since we are still at square one?

The CC campus already has Arlington Tech, Arlington Community HS, CTE classrooms, Montessori.  Can we just spend the minimum we need to give the Arl Tech students a decent campus and focus on how to maximize our MS/HS seats with the budget and properties available to us?  The CIP presentation doesn't include costs but it does include a ton of new building and tearing down existing buildings at the CC site (and I thought the CTE classrooms were really expensive and needed to stay where they are?).  This cannot be the most cost effective, quickest solution available.  But has APS even considered other alternatives?[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics