Board of Ed meets with JCJ

The Board of Education had a brief special meeting on Monday night to hear from JCJ Architecture about the District Utilization Study, and conduct other business in executive session. At the meeting, Jim LaPosta from JCJ stood in for Project Manager Greg Smolley. He started out with a general overview of his firm's qualifications and then described the process they are using to study the balance between the demographics of the student body and school buildings. As readers of the Eye know, the firm is charged both with making short-term recommendations about the overcrowding at Moody School (for 2009-10), and then producing a long-term study on grade configuration, racial balance and facility use throughout the district.

According to the presentation, here's where things stand:

At this point, JCJ has visited about half of the elementary schools in town, cataloging the classroom space, reviewing the other facilities and learning about the demographics of the student body. Also, the firm has held two "visioning workshops", first at Moody School and then at Macdonough.

Three of the Board members have attended the visioning workshops: Corinne Gill, Sheila Daniels and Ryan Kennedy. Some of the others were less familiar with the process that the consultant is using and LaPosta took the opportunity to point out that a simple number crunching of building space vs. students only takes a few weeks, but it is too blunt a tool for understanding how the schools fit into our community. He said that the visioning workshops help the consultants listen to what people really want from the schools overall. This ranges from determining the local appetite and/or tolerance for spending on school buildings to the opportunities to open the schools for many more community uses.

Jay Keiser noted that a new visioning workshop has been added for Spencer School on April 22nd. He voiced concern that if Spencer was now facing an impact from redistricting like Moody and Macdonough, then the parents should be told that specifically. This is a bit of an awkward situation, since the consultants have repeatedly said that no assumptions can be made about which schools will be affected by the short-term redistricting plan -- in fact, they are not yet saying that any changes should be made at all. Moody and Macdonough families were reassured that all the elementary schools would be studied for excess capacity, not just their two buildings. LaPosta did state that the assessment of each school's physical capacity would be completed within the next few weeks, and would be considered in the short-term recommendations.

Let's move to the question of timelines. In a slight case of "deadline creep", JCJ now says that they will have the short-term recommendations by mid to late May, or at least by the end of May. Before that time, they will have a visioning workshop with teachers, in addition to the above-mentioned Spencer School workshop. (Revision: After publication, I learned that there will also be a visioning workshop at Snow School on April 30th.) There is also a community-wide meeting planned for April 27th at Woodrow Wilson Middle School, but it is not yet clear if there will be preliminary recommendations at that session, as was suggested at the Macdonough workshop.

Board members questioned the timing of the long-term study, which is promised to arrive by early winter of next year. It was pointed out that any significant changes for 2010-2011 would probably take months to consider and implement. The request was made to get that report back by late Fall 2009, and LaPosta seemed amenable to considering that.

From over here in the cheap seats, I'm starting to worry about waiting another 6-7 weeks before the short-term study is released. There will be tremendous pressure on the Board to make their decision quickly, because of all the logistical changes involved in redistricting families and moving classrooms around. But there will also need to be a period of shock, community feedback and consensus about the decision, not to mention an opportunity to consider the practicality of the recommendations. Stop me if you've already seen this movie, but I think that's the part where parents show up in droves to complain and people are up in arms about the lack of transparency, poor planning and hasty decision-making. I'm all for blue-sky visioning, but I hope the nuts and bolts analysis of the capacity of our buildings and the size of our student body will be released as soon as possible. Surely our short-term solutions will come from that information. Then we could all take a breath and consider our vision for the school system without the cloud of immediate re-districting over our heads.