An email disputing my last post …

*******,

….with:

My thoughts are inserted in your email.

Harry

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 8:20 PM, ******** wrote:

Harry You need to look at the research of an effective size of a high school which maximizes personal attention while being able to offer maximum opportunities for students. 

After we spent $480 million on the Red Plan its too late to consider the best size for high schools in ISD 709. What we have is what we will continue to have. I don’t disagree with the enrollment recommendations you mention. I’ve always been appalled at the NY City model where their schools were huge and so soulless they were given numbers instead of names. But on the other hand I’m not a one kind fits all sort of fellow. I’m prepared to make what we have work as well as it can and believe the human touch, given a chance, can overcome all sorts of facility disadvantages including size.

The high schools were too BIG. Over and over again research points to enrollment sizes UNDER 1000 kids, some even suggesting 700 students is the perfect number, to be the most effective at providing the best education. 

We will not need to close a high school. Edison will be the perfect size high school and that’s what will pull our students away. And that may force our schools smaller and our actual educating of the students may drastically improve. Or we could lump them all back into one high school and continue the status quo against all research suggestions on enrollment. 

I agree that Edison’s size will be a draw but it will also not be able to offer what the ISD 709 schools do because of financial constraints. Our schools will become necessarily smaller with an Edison school in the vicinity but that will have more negative initial impacts than positive ones. Why? Because smaller students mean a smaller faculty and more limited course offerings – And Because maintenance costs will increase as we have more empty space (the primary justification for building the Red Plan in the first place) – And because we will find ourselves losing some of our more stable students leaving a little more concentrated free and reduced lunch population in our schools with attendant consequences – And because as our teachers fall under more stress trying to match Edison’s zeal it will become harder and harder to live one day at a time. What’s happening now at Denfeld will surely accelerate.

As for abandoning Denfeld that is no more a practical option than it was ten years ago – at least for a while. And I agree about the size issue. I opposed a single school for two reasons. First because I didn’t think it would fly politically and second because one huge school would have had the effect of turning kids into numbers. I may have been a little alarmist in this post owing to my frustration and my penchant for irony as in Look at the fine mess the Red Plan has left us with . That’s a point I grimly enjoy repeating ad nauseam. I see no great upside to the community as a whole in the creation of a new Edison High School and I expect to have two grandsons attending it.

Educate yourself on the topic. 

*******…tsk, tsk, tsk…isn’t that comment a touch patronizing?