>>>>> "Dan" == Dan McGuire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Dan> I attended the meeting last Tuesday at Edison. Both
Dan> Webster and
Dan> Waite Park were well represented with compelling advocacy for
Dan> their programs. There was no response to my one question,
Dan> 'what will this cost /save in dollars" other than to say that
Dan> there will be more later.
Dan> Privately, Judy Farmer told me after I had asked my question
Dan> that they
Dan> purposely didn't want to talk about money yet so as "not to
Dan> give the impression that this was just about the money."
I attended the meeting in Southwest last Thursday evening. I haven't
had time to thoroughly write up my impressions (and given the way this
decision is being rammed through, am unlikely to have the time to do a
good job). But I had the same overall impression of the consultants
and other official participants ducking crucial questions.
Most of the attendees at our meeting were concerned about the proposed
Jefferson closing. For those who don't know about the plan, the
proposal is to take Jefferson Community School, "repurpose" it (in
some way that has yet to be specified), and merge its programs into
Whittier school. There were many fears expressed, but the two primary
ones were:
1. Whittier is a K-5 school that is smaller than Jefferson.
Jefferson is a fully-utilized K-8. How is Jefferson to be merged
into Whittier? Related concerns had to do with the fact that
Jefferson has a large auditorium, whereas Whittier has only a
small multi-purpose room, and Whittier can't have after-school
sports, because its gym is shared with the city park there. There
were many related concerns that I don't have time to go into
(e.g., Whittier wasn't built for the physically larger middle
school kids, Whittier's classrooms are smaller, etc.).
At no time did the consultants engage with this question; they
simply took notes on these concerns.
2. There was a large representation of Spanish-speaking parents at
the meeting. Jefferson has a large ELL program, and is a center
for bilingual and English language learning for Spanish-speaking
students. The large number of parents at the meeting were happy
with the program at Jefferson and deeply concerned about its fate
upon merger into Whittier. The only response they were given was
that they were entitled to Spanish-sensitive instruction for their
children under the law, so they would get it from the School
district. In my opinion, what these parents were being asked to
do was to trade their children's functioning ELL program for a
lottery ticket on a new ELL program. There is a vanishingly small
probability that the new ELL program at Whittier would be better
than the one they have now, and an extremely high probability that
it will be worse, once the students are dislocated and the
teaching team is smashed.
Beyond these two points, I was left with a very unpleasant impression
of the facilities planning process. Dan has already talked about the
fact that educators seem to have been purposely excluded from the
planning process, which seems akin to leaving pilots, air traffic
controllers, and airlines out of airport design. But I was also left
feeling that in this process representative democracy has come off the
rais.
My impression was that the consultants felt that their job was simply
to design some plans --- and I think they are trying to design the
best plans they can --- and present them to the School Board.
Interacting with the community at large, and convincing us of the
reasonableness of their plans was not part of the job description. At
the same time, the Board of Education is not engaging the community.
I feel that the Board would like the consultants to come up with the
plan, and push the decision-making responsibility onto them, since the
Board had troubles with this last time around.
The result of these two processes, in my opinion, is that no one is
trying to present the details of the plan to the community or to
engage the community and convince us that they are making decisions in
the best interests of the population of the city. This seems like a
badly mis-functioning democracy.
--
Robert P. Goldman
ECCO
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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