I'd scrap Montessori too. Doesn't serve many low income families after kindergarten. Weirdly restricted by "Montessori experience" which is code for those lucky enough to be able to manage their pre K option or who can afford private Montessori preschool. If you want Montessori please just send your kid to private school. Keep immersion. Scrap the rest of them. Make the seats lotteries by neighborhood so we can predict their enrollment. Sorry that Key got screwed by SB, but please don't foist the problem with the change into admissions policies on the rest of us. We don't want the option school taking our neighborhood seats either. This problem should not be forced south or west.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To those who don't want immersion, are you the same folks who don't want any Spanish speaking families in your neighborhood and fight any effort to bring affordable housing to higher priced Arlington neighborhoods?

I don’t have an issue with immersion existing. I do have a problem with it being placed in Key zone with no neighborhood preference. At that point you are absolutely saying the option school is more important than the neighborhood’s needs.

That's true of every single neighborhood you might put Key in. There is no where you can put 800 kids without overcrowding the other neighborhood schools. So saying you're good with Key existing as long as it's not in your neighborhood is essentially saying you're fine seeing someone else get screwed as long as it's not you.

Key immersion doesn’t have to be 800 kids without neighborhood preference. They can control the class size. Also, kids in Courthouse and Rosslyn don’t have another school nearby.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To those who don't want immersion, are you the same folks who don't want any Spanish speaking families in your neighborhood and fight any effort to bring affordable housing to higher priced Arlington neighborhoods?

I don’t have an issue with immersion existing. I do have a problem with it being placed in Key zone with no neighborhood preference. At that point you are absolutely saying the option school is more important than the neighborhood’s needs.

That's true of every single neighborhood you might put Key in. There is no where you can put 800 kids without overcrowding the other neighborhood schools. So saying you're good with Key existing as long as it's not in your neighborhood is essentially saying you're fine seeing someone else get screwed as long as it's not you.

Anonymous wrote:To those who don't want immersion, are you the same folks who don't want any Spanish speaking families in your neighborhood and fight any effort to bring affordable housing to higher priced Arlington neighborhoods?

I think programs are nice to haves. Neighborhood schools are need to haves. Taking neighborhood seats away and replacing the. With lottery programs only to say “oh but the lottery program will relieve overcrowding” is dumb. APS today is very different than it was 20yrs ago when kids could easily transfer to any school they wanted because schools at all levels had capacity.

We have ESL support in all schools. ATS pedagogically speaking may be out of touch with current approaches to early education. We are proud to have these lottery programs in our system,but they come at a price of neighborhood seats. It has nothing to do with not welcoming fa,I lies who speak different languages.

I think there is a difference among the option schools and their intrinsic merit. I support immersion, I think it should continue to exist even though it is not for my children. Yes, it should stay as an "option." However, I want to see "special" programs like HB and ATS scrapped. Those don't make sense to me, both because of numbers and because whatever it is that they do that's so "special" should be extended to all schools. Likewise, extend the Montessori model to as many schools as possible. Done.

"Option" needs differentiation.

Anonymous wrote:To those who don't want immersion, are you the same folks who don't want any Spanish speaking families in your neighborhood and fight any effort to bring affordable housing to higher priced Arlington neighborhoods?

I don’t have an issue with immersion existing. I do have a problem with it being placed in Key zone with no neighborhood preference. At that point you are absolutely saying the option school is more important than the neighborhood’s needs.

Anonymous wrote:Immersion is cool. I just want the unpredictability that choice schools bring to capacity and enrollment gone. If you keep choice, give every neighborhood a set number of seats like GB. No general lottery. That way we can predict where they are coming from. And you could increase or decrease based on where you need capacity help.

Agreed. This is the only way to keep the choice programs at all manageable. Seats allocated to neighborhood school zones based on how under or over capacity their schools are. Everyone has a shot, but an under-capacity school can't become even more so by sending a disproportionate number of students to an option program because they got lucky while and over-capacity school gets even worse because their families are largely shut out.

Anonymous wrote:To those who don't want immersion, are you the same folks who don't want any Spanish speaking families in your neighborhood and fight any effort to bring affordable housing to higher priced Arlington neighborhoods?

Where was there affordable housing proposed in a higher-priced and then fought by the locals? Please tell me the proposed location and when this happened? You can't blame a neighborhood for not supporting a project that never existed for them to support.

HB. Not GB.

Immersion is cool. I just want the unpredictability that choice schools bring to capacity and enrollment gone. If you keep choice, give every neighborhood a set number of seats like GB. No general lottery. That way we can predict where they are coming from. And you could increase or decrease based on where you need capacity help.

To those who don't want immersion, are you the same folks who don't want any Spanish speaking families in your neighborhood and fight any effort to bring affordable housing to higher priced Arlington neighborhoods?

Anonymous wrote:There was no hidden long-term agenda. The reason why Nottingham is under consideration is that Tuckahoe launched an all-out attack to keep themselves out of consideration. Honestly, by 2021, they will need all the seats in the NW and this exercise is a huge waste of time.

Tuckahoe attacked? IT seemed to me they asked alot of questions about the process

Anonymous wrote:Yet, the two immersion schools have no problem filling their seats and then some. Just because you don’t see a value to immersion doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable AND popular.

Isn’t that what started this whole mess? Changing Key to option-only to accommodate increased demand for immersion.

Yet, the two immersion schools have no problem filling their seats and then some. Just because you don’t see a value to immersion doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable AND popular.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe it’s time to end immersion.

I dare you to suggest that at the next school board meeting. I’ll bring popcorn.

With FLES and ESL in place, it should be open for debate. Or perhaps there should be one immersion school. Two immersion schools in a small county seems excessive.

Oh, I think we should do away with all of the option programs. I’m just not going to sign up to have my house egged by saying it publicly.