School Capacity Forums

The forums, spread over two nights, offer precious little time to discuss and digest related issues that the public needs to consider before answering survey questions about a decision so momentous as building a new school.

• The survey questions are skewed in favor of building a new school without first having a deep-dive into related issues: how do we enhance pre-school programs, what plans are being pursued for an innovative workforce development program, what are the “secondary” costs of a new school such as staffing/operations, what about adaptively reusing other buildings, and what impact would all this have on our real estate taxes?
• Remember the Slave Auction Block forums and the Small Area Plan Charrettes? Those were very successful because they included significant public outreach that went on for months. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.
• And what happened to the $1M set aside to study and consider creative solutions to the school capacity issue?

I’m afraid the City is playing Whack-a-Mole with the school capacity problem right now. Instead, we should first identify the interrelated issues, have robust public input, and then craft a comprehensive solution that spans the issues (like the center of a Venn Diagram). If you’re doing things the same way you did them 15 years ago – dealing with one problem at a time, which is what’s happening here – you’re doing them wrong.  It’s perfectly obvious that our lower grade schools have a capacity crisis, but to say that it’s the only crisis is fundamentally wrong.

While building a new school may very well be the correct answer, without all considerations vetted properly, it may not end well for the City.  

We need a robust, 21st Century solution to a bevy of serious and interrelated education issues. It’s time.