Co-Location?? what??

One of the biggest reasons for my lack of blogging this winter/spring was due to my involvement in trying to persuade my son's school district not to combine his K-4 elementary school with the 5-8 middle school. The funny thing is - it was the perfect content to actually write about. But I was so involved, it was like a 2nd job and I was just too tired to write.

So here is the skinny of what went on. As with many school districts, ours was faced with a pretty significant budget shortfall. 1.4 million to be exact. The superintendent (or "Captain Beef up my Resume" as I like to call him) proposed several options to help address the deficit. One of them being the "Co-Location" of my son's elementary school and the middle school. What the hell is co-location? They had no plans for developing a curriculum...and these are the other items they didn't have answers for (at least not until we started asking about them):

1. Playground - uh - there was none...so in addition to what ever costs you were saving you have to add back in the cost of building a playground


2. Technology - the middle school's technology was woefully inadequate to add another 350 students - so lets add back in the costs of upgrading the technology


3. Stairs - Are you seriously going to have kindergartners going to walk up a flight of stairs every time they came into and out of the building, ate lunch, went to the gym or library?


4. Moving costs - if they were going to bring over everything from the other school, lets deduct that cost from the savings


5. Busing - you are now going to put K-12 students on the buses? Really??


6. In the district you will now have K-4, K-5 and K-8?? How cohesive is that?

These are just a few of the items that were concerning. The other items we were facing was that other schools wanted to use our Elementary school. What? Oh, we were going to gain revenue from the rental of our building. They presented a few different interested parties but when we actually called them (and by we - I mean the parents) we found out that none of these schools have actually visited our elementary school and it was just one school on a list of possible schools. So now the superintendent wanted to close a high performing elementary school - disrupt the education of all of those students on maybes???

There were a bunch of parents who met tirelessly with community members and school board members, had petitions, and presentations and argued each and every point the superintendent raised for closing the school. Until finally the board decided to not pursue the "co-location" and voted to put together a committee to study the redesign of the whole district.

Now that is better. Go slow, get all your fact, make a decision that benefits the whole district, not just the detriment of 1 school. If ultimately they decide that co-locating our school is the best move - then I may be all for it.

So what is happening now - I just applied to be on the "Strategic Redesign Committee". I find out tonight. There were 70 applications for 25 slots. Keep your fingers crossed!!