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Let me get this straight.
As a result of student
enrollment projections a few years ago, the WJC School Board decided that we
needed a new middle school. So, up went At the same time, and despite other
projections, the school gurus decided to close Last summer, the school
administration decided to sell off the seven trailers it had been using for
overflows. Now comes the news that the
most recent student enrollment projections for middle schools indicate that
they may have to sustain additional enrollments of up to 76 students next
year and perhaps as many as 140-150 by 2017.
What to do? The first reaction of school
administrators was to propose slapping additions on Hornsby and Berkeley
middle schools at a cost of $3.4 million. Despite the fact that this proposal
has met with strong opposition from some School Board members, it has,
nevertheless, popped in and out of various budgets, including the latest one
from the superintendent’s office. But if we don’t start tacking
additional space onto the existing middle schools, what’s the
alternative? Well, trailers, of course. But
we just sold all our trailers, didn’t we?
Yes, we did. We’ll just have to
buy new ones. Or, we could let the present
middle schools bulge with additional students until we have enough of an overflow
to build another new middle school. Or, now that the present
renovations to James Blair are almost complete, we could reverse gears, retrofit that for a few more
shekels and turn it back into a middle school. But, if we do that, where will
the School Board and school administrators live? No idea. What about retrofitted
old school buses or trailers parked in Cooley Field? I don’t know about you, but it
seems to me that all of this is getting very, very embarrassing. In fact, it
sounds like a script pilfered from a Laurel and Hardy movie. To begin with, the science of
projecting enrollments for any school level or year seems bogus at best.
Numbers are all over the spectrum and rarely pan out to be credible when the
projected year rolls around. You recall we plodded through this same numbers
swamp when the decision was made to build a new middle and elementary school.
But most unimaginary was the
bleary-eyed decision to close James Blair and turn it into administrative offices.
Certainly there must have been some indication that So, rather than renovating what
was an embarrassingly dingy school and preparing it for additional students,
why did we close it and turn it over to administrators who, though admittedly
cramped for space in their old digs, could lodge themselves elsewhere? And why, as new projections
were coming in, did we sell off all those trailers last summer? Clearly something is incredibly
askew with the school planning process. Rather than developing a
comprehensive plan based on solid evidence relative to growth and student
enrollment needs, we seem to hop-scotch from one crisis to another, making or
not making decisions based on whatever momentary developmental demon raises
its ugly head. As a result, long-range
planning is either nonexistent or in such a shambles that school
administrators and the School Board itself seem flummoxed at every turn, as
wasted money shuffles down the drain in an attempt to mollify the next crisis
du jour. For now, the most reasonable
course of action would seem to be to return James Blair to our students and
let the administrators go elsewhere. Those old buses in Cooley Field
are looking better all the time. |
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lewleadbeater.com Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved email: LWL@lewleadbeater.com |
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