The Superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, Erroll Davis, Jr., is unflappable in the video, as he speaks with an engineer's precision. "We have 10,000 middle school students," Mr. Davis said. "We can't put 10,000 students in Inman and Sutton." Although many of the issues associated with redistricting in APS have been decided, the capacity issues at Inman have been not. There had been a proposal to have the Inman 6th graders attend a different school and only have the current Inman campus house the the 7th and 8th graders. That was unpopular with many families whose children attend Inman as well as the neighborhood where the 6th graders would go, where they (1) wanted to keep their school open, and (2) didn't want kids from outside their neighborhood to come there when their children couldn't attend the school.
Tonight the Virginia Highland Civic Association is sponsoring a meeting at Inman to discuss the issue. Nominally the meeting is about criteria for evaluating proposals for addressing capacity, rather than solutions to the capacity issue; I've seen similar notices of meetings in other neighborhoods. I hope it's a good discussion and some good ideas emerge. But I am not too optimistic that this public engagement approach will lead to a solution that shares the pain equitably - there are too clearly winners and losers, with underutilized schools with lower test scores that could take more kids, but families whose children attend schools with better test scores don't want their children sent there, especially if the better current school is closer to their home. (Disclosure: my kids went to private school after Morningside Elementary. We could have sent them to Inman but did not.)
Inman could house more students if half attended in the morning and half in the afternoon (good luck with that), or if schools did like employers do who don't have room for everyone had let the kids with good grades telework (good luck with that one too). There's no room on the current site to build out, although I understand they are adding trailers as a temporary solution for the 2012-2013 year; maybe they could do what intown homeowners do when when they don't have enough room and build up. Maybe Inman could be 4 stories tall.
I've been reading some of the comments on Maureen Downey's blog on this topic from back in March, when the 6th grade academy idea was briefly on the table. It's pretty depressing, and largely was focused on the contextual issues of race and socioeconomic status that make this so difficult, and recurrent suggestions that one or another elementary school -- one other people's children attend -- be zoned to another middle school. That was pretty much it.
Mr. Davis is right - half the middle school students in the city cannot attend Inman, and right now there is not room at Inman for all the children in the 5 elementary schools that are currently planned to feed into the school. Either capacity at Inman has to increase or fewer students have to come there. One issue Mr. Davis raised in the interview was to bring back magnet schools. How about a magnet school as a second middle school in the Grady cluster? It couldn't be done overnight, but it could be done.
Mr. Davis is as best I can tell making a heroic effort to manage the bad hand he was dealt, with the mess APS was left in, following the departure of his predecessor. There are no easy solutions here and I'm glad it's not my decision. More to follow, I'm sure.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Saturday, June 23, 2012
A Block Party
We had our block party earlier this month. It was the Sunday evening of the weekend of Summerfest, the Virginia Highland Civic Association's huge outdoor festival that usually takes place the first weekend in June. Summerfest ends late afternoon and our block parties don't start til evening, so we thought it wasn't too much of a conflict. And it's not like we spend all day preparing for our block party -- although there is some preparation (perhaps a little more than is visible) it is not much, and we don't think anyone stays home and cooks all afternoon. So we thought the date would work.
Lynsley talked to Morningside Presbyterian, and got permission for us to use their parking lot. I printed up some flyers and Sally distributed them. I sent out some emails and posted it on the Wessyngton Road page on Facebook. Since one of our neighbors doesn't have email, I dropped a flyer and a copy of the email onto her porch through the cat door.
Late Sunday afternoon I put orange cones at the two entrances of the parking lot. Mark dropped off a large folding table, Kathy and Lynsley brought card tables, and I took a folding table and a table cloth up to the parking lot. Steve brought a charcoal grill and a bag of charcoal. I brought sidewalk chalk and bubbles and glow bracelets, and paper plates and plastic cups and plastic utensils and napkins. Lynsley brought a pitcher of ice water and a bottle of hand sanitizer and her trash and recycling bins.
Our neighbors -- most of them people we had met before, but not all -- came with food and folding chairs and small coolers with drinks. Small kids and then bigger kids drew on the asphalt with chalk. Caroline and Iain tossed a frisbee back and forth for a while There was music, thanks to Mark and several friends of his. There was plenty of food.
Some of us stayed there until long after dark. I had forgotten about the glow bracelets while the children were there -- they had long gone home -- so the adults wore them and I put several together to make a blue glowing necklace for Bullwinkle. Eventually people made their way home along with the chairs and the tables and by morning all that was left were the drawings the kids had made on the asphalt.
It wasn't the biggest block party we ever had, and there are others when things have gone on later into the night or at which there were more new neighbors we'd never met before. But I think the street's youngest resident (at that time) and oldest resident both attended, along with people who'd live on the street for decades and others who were recent arrivals, and people who live in big new houses and from small older homes and from the apartments that are on the street. This diversity is one of the special things about my street. My favorite memory of the evening? We have a neighbor -- I think she may be the oldest resident on the street -- who is an artist and speaks with a lovely Latin American accent. She showed up fashionably late, towards the end of the party. She was thanking the musicians for playing and then I saw her standing near them, listening, and dancing by herself in the dark.
Lynsley talked to Morningside Presbyterian, and got permission for us to use their parking lot. I printed up some flyers and Sally distributed them. I sent out some emails and posted it on the Wessyngton Road page on Facebook. Since one of our neighbors doesn't have email, I dropped a flyer and a copy of the email onto her porch through the cat door.
Late Sunday afternoon I put orange cones at the two entrances of the parking lot. Mark dropped off a large folding table, Kathy and Lynsley brought card tables, and I took a folding table and a table cloth up to the parking lot. Steve brought a charcoal grill and a bag of charcoal. I brought sidewalk chalk and bubbles and glow bracelets, and paper plates and plastic cups and plastic utensils and napkins. Lynsley brought a pitcher of ice water and a bottle of hand sanitizer and her trash and recycling bins.
Our neighbors -- most of them people we had met before, but not all -- came with food and folding chairs and small coolers with drinks. Small kids and then bigger kids drew on the asphalt with chalk. Caroline and Iain tossed a frisbee back and forth for a while There was music, thanks to Mark and several friends of his. There was plenty of food.
Some of us stayed there until long after dark. I had forgotten about the glow bracelets while the children were there -- they had long gone home -- so the adults wore them and I put several together to make a blue glowing necklace for Bullwinkle. Eventually people made their way home along with the chairs and the tables and by morning all that was left were the drawings the kids had made on the asphalt.
It wasn't the biggest block party we ever had, and there are others when things have gone on later into the night or at which there were more new neighbors we'd never met before. But I think the street's youngest resident (at that time) and oldest resident both attended, along with people who'd live on the street for decades and others who were recent arrivals, and people who live in big new houses and from small older homes and from the apartments that are on the street. This diversity is one of the special things about my street. My favorite memory of the evening? We have a neighbor -- I think she may be the oldest resident on the street -- who is an artist and speaks with a lovely Latin American accent. She showed up fashionably late, towards the end of the party. She was thanking the musicians for playing and then I saw her standing near them, listening, and dancing by herself in the dark.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Not in My Backyard
The watershed defined much of the street layout of our immediate neighborhood, with houses on the relatively high ground and behind the houses uninhabitable greenspace that usually includes a deep or shallow ravine. Behind our house there are tall trees and dense undergrowth and a steep slope down and then back up. When it rains, gravity takes the water down to the bottom of the ravine, but more gradually than immediately, since the rain doesn't run off the deep beds of leaves that cover the ground the way it runs of the pavement. The gushing water in the creek at the end of Wessyngton last Sunday morning came from the street and driveways and any gutters that dump into the street, not from the wooded areas behind our houses. The water ends up in storm drains and creeks and ends up in the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.
Sunday morning it was cool (at least for Atlanta, in June) and raining when I took Bullwinkle for a walk. We started on our usual walk, up Wessyngton Road toward Highland, right on Highland, then right again on Morningside. We headed back into the grounds of Morningside Presbyterian Church and then headed down the path into the woods toward the foot bridge. That morning it was cool enough for the dog to enjoy the walk so just before the bridge we took a right turn onto the trail that headed into the wooded area between Morningside and Wessyngton, back toward Cumberland.
The last time I walked on this trail, it ended at a timbered semicircle, with two benches made from rough-hewn logs; restoring the trail and either constructing or restoring this stopping place had been an Eagle Scout project for one of the boys in Iain's Boy Scout troop a few years ago. I also knew that another boy had recently had another Eagle Scout project in the same area -- Iain had spent a weekend afternoon or two there, helping out -- but I hadn't been there since the recent work. Now the trail was extended farther down, so Bullwinkle and I continued into woods, toward a place we'd never been. So we walked on.
At the end of the new path I was astonished to find the remains of a large fireplace -- the kind used for outdoor cooking -- on a concrete pad at the end of the trail. This is just across the street from me, and I had no idea it was there; I felt like I had stumbled onto an archaeological site. Tom told me, later in the day, that he thought there had formerly been a cabin there, left over from the days of a very large Boy Scout troop at Morningside Presbyterian at some point in the distant past.
This reminded me of the discussion at the Park Pride meeting I attended last month, about the South Fork Conservancy's proposal to develop trails along the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, and the staunch opposition from many of the people present. Some of the arguments had to do with private property rights and some with privacy and some with fear of crime, and the discussion got me wondering how I would feel about a trail through the greenspace behind my house. But there is a trail through the greenspace across the street, and as best I can tell, nothing catastrophic has happened. There aren't homeless people living there, there was no trash, and no flat screen TVs that were abandoned by thieves who had entered unlocked backdoors. There was just a path through the woods, and a wonderful place to walk with the dog on a rainy Sunday morning.
Sunday morning it was cool (at least for Atlanta, in June) and raining when I took Bullwinkle for a walk. We started on our usual walk, up Wessyngton Road toward Highland, right on Highland, then right again on Morningside. We headed back into the grounds of Morningside Presbyterian Church and then headed down the path into the woods toward the foot bridge. That morning it was cool enough for the dog to enjoy the walk so just before the bridge we took a right turn onto the trail that headed into the wooded area between Morningside and Wessyngton, back toward Cumberland.
The last time I walked on this trail, it ended at a timbered semicircle, with two benches made from rough-hewn logs; restoring the trail and either constructing or restoring this stopping place had been an Eagle Scout project for one of the boys in Iain's Boy Scout troop a few years ago. I also knew that another boy had recently had another Eagle Scout project in the same area -- Iain had spent a weekend afternoon or two there, helping out -- but I hadn't been there since the recent work. Now the trail was extended farther down, so Bullwinkle and I continued into woods, toward a place we'd never been. So we walked on.
At the end of the new path I was astonished to find the remains of a large fireplace -- the kind used for outdoor cooking -- on a concrete pad at the end of the trail. This is just across the street from me, and I had no idea it was there; I felt like I had stumbled onto an archaeological site. Tom told me, later in the day, that he thought there had formerly been a cabin there, left over from the days of a very large Boy Scout troop at Morningside Presbyterian at some point in the distant past.
This reminded me of the discussion at the Park Pride meeting I attended last month, about the South Fork Conservancy's proposal to develop trails along the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, and the staunch opposition from many of the people present. Some of the arguments had to do with private property rights and some with privacy and some with fear of crime, and the discussion got me wondering how I would feel about a trail through the greenspace behind my house. But there is a trail through the greenspace across the street, and as best I can tell, nothing catastrophic has happened. There aren't homeless people living there, there was no trash, and no flat screen TVs that were abandoned by thieves who had entered unlocked backdoors. There was just a path through the woods, and a wonderful place to walk with the dog on a rainy Sunday morning.
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