The Richardson ISD announced that due to a severe budget shortfall, it is necessary to consolidate (i.e., close) five elementary schools. One of them is Springridge Elementary. Its students are to be reassigned mostly to Dartmouth Elementary. The big problem with that plan is that there isn't enough room at Dartmouth for all the students vacating Springridge.
The RISD's solution involves, first, reassigning 42 students who live in the Forestridge Elementary attendance area, but for various historical reasons were assigned to Springridge, back to Forestridge. And second, like dominos, changing an attendance boundary to reassign 113 Dartmouth students to Yale Elementary to create enough room to transfer the remaining 221 Springridge students to Dartmouth.
I thought I had a better solution.
My solution doesn't work. It turns out that RISD has given this more thought than I had, or at least had more information than I had.
My solution was simple. Dartmouth would still absorb a hundred or more Springridge students, but some or all of the elementary schools at Mark Twain, Jess Harben, and O. Henry would absorb some, too, eliminating the need to evict any students from Dartmouth, a neighborhood school that isn't being consolidated.
What was wrong with my solution? I learned that Mark Twain, Jess Harben, and O. Henry don't have as many "empty seats" as the data provided by RISD suggests. It's not as simple as taking the school enrollments and utilization percentages and calculating how many empty seats each school must have. That's because schools also house "central programs" for students of various needs. Classrooms are used for those programs, but can't serve as general education classrooms.
I learned that this exercise of musical chairs that I tried to play cannot, in fact, be played at home. The data the RISD provided in the Project RightSize document published this week sounded like the data we at home needed to explore different solutions ourselves. But it seems to be useless for that purpose. It doesn't tell us how many "real" empty seats exist at each school, after subtracting all the classroom space being used for central programs. With pre-K being a central program that RISD plans to expand and disperse to more and more campuses, some of those empty seats may already be spoken for and not available for me to shift Springridge students into. Ronald Reagan said, trust, but verify, but unless RISD makes all such data available, we have to trust RISD administrators to get it right without being able to verify it ourselves.
If I concede that Jess Harben and Mark Twain don't have the room needed, and Yale has to be utilized to solve this game of musical chairs, then it makes geographical sense that some Dartmouth students be the ones transferred to Yale, not Springridge students or even Mark Twain students, all of whom would have to travel farther. And that is what the RISD plan ended up as. It may not be a solution that makes me happy, but when you eliminate all the unworkable solutions, you have to go with whatever is left.
There's one alternative I haven't mentioned that would be even less satisfactory to the Dartmouth community. Just looking at the map, closing Dartmouth seems more logical than closing Springridge. Yale and Springridge would be left open, each centrally located in one of the two remaining attendance zones. By closing Springridge instead, Dartmouth is way too far north for the population it will serve. But maps are just one criterion that went into these decisions. At the listening meeting at Berkner High School Tuesday night, I'm sure Springridge parents will be eager to get a fuller explanation of the decision to choose Springridge for closure. Dartmouth parents will have to be consoled with the knowledge that the Springridge community might feel they have a more legitimate beef themselves.
What's really scary is that this exercise might have to be repeated a few years from now. RISD says, "We currently have more than 9,000 empty elementary school seats, and project more than 12,000 empty seats when our students complete the move to middle schools." The four schools to be closed next year affect only about 1,500 students. In other words, our "empty seats" problem is not going to be solved with the currently planned closures.
"Budget shortfall looms.
Springridge faces closure's doom.
Dartmouth in dismay?"
—h/t ChatGPT
2 comments:
A Dartmouth/Duck Creek-related petition:
https://chng.it/5ttgXkhxnT
From an RISD document ("Richardson ISD Elementary School Enrollment and Capacity October 28, 2022 (Snapshot Date))", there is this important caveat: "Note: Campus capacity based on all classrooms used as regular classrooms." There's no way to tell from that page how many classrooms are used for things other than regular classrooms, and how important each of those other things is, and thereby determine what what I'll call the "real" excess capacity is at each school. I know now that many classrooms are taken over for "central programs". For example, the pre-K program is one. But special ed programs are, too. Without having knowledge about how each school is being used, room by room, I can't say whether enough Springridge students can be accommodated elsewhere to keep Dartmouth students from being shifted to Yale.
Post a Comment