“Extreme,” “shocking,” “fatally flawed” and “dumbfounding” were just some of the descriptors livid parents called the Arlington schools chief’s plan to dramatically shift elementary school boundaries during an emotionally charged public comment session at Thursday’s night’s school board meeting.
“Almost half of my son’s second-grade class is going to be moving if we enact this plan, and many of those kids now walk to school,” Paul Kenneth Martin, who has two sons at McKinley Elementary, told the school board and Superintendent Robert G. Smith. “We’re going to be creating a whole new block of commuter kids.”
Of the 38 parents and community members allowed to speak at the meeting, two expressed some support for Smith’s plan to move 655 of the county’s 9,600 elementary school students to help combat school overcrowding in Arlington’s northwest quarter.
The board has added two more public hearings on the issue, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
Some parents choked up and at least one shed tears when speaking about boundary changes that they said would result in siblings attending separate schools and neighborhoods being “torn apart.”
Under the proposed plan, students at 11 elementary schools would be moved to other schools while 19 schools would have students move in.
“I had a charge from my governing board to come back with a recommendation that would meet the criteria that they had established,” Smith said.
Those criteria included relieving crowding at specific schools and leaving room in each school for at least one pre-kindergarten program.
Smith said he did not believe that recommendations from a board-appointed committee of parents, which proposed alternatives to boundary changes, came close enough to meeting the charge.
“I would be disappointed if people did not want to stay in their current schools,” he told The Examiner Friday. “I would also be surprised if what I recommended happens exactly as I’ve recommended it. The real question is: to what degree does it change?”
Two of five board members, Chairman Ed Fendley and Sally Baird, said they did not support the plan, with Fendley calling it “a terrible proposal” that “harms far more kids than it helps.”
“Now they have decisions to make, and they’ll work through that,” Smith said of the school board. “There are competing values here and I’m not suggesting that there’s only one right answer.”
