Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Year round schools in Raleigh
Wake county has finally bit the bullet and taken the easy way out and gone with a short term fix for school overcrowding....year round schools. The school board has decided that 23 elementary schools and, possibly, some number of middle schools will go year round. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not really against year round schools. As a parent there are a lot things I like about year round. BUT, there are other issues here. I'll list them:
1) We just don't have enough good teachers as it is. Year round schools don't solve this. You still need teachers. My concern is that this is going to make it harder to keep the good teachers in the Wake County School district. I don't think all of them will leave, but some will not want to deal with the hassle of having their high school kid on a different schedule (I know I wouldn't) or packing up their stuff every 9 weeks to move to a different class, etc.
2) What if you have a kid in elementary or middle school and one in high school? Now they are on completely different schedules. The parents that can afford it are going to go to private schools. This will perpetuate the flight of the well-to-do away from public schools.
3) This is a short term fix. The Wake/Raleigh school planners need to get their act together. Stop building palatial 500-600 kid elementary schools and start building reasonable 1000 kid elementary schools. They keep talking like this is rocket science, but it really isn't. The planners just aren't very smart.
Raleigh has a history of good schools. I hope I'm wrong and that this isn't the start of the decline.
1) We just don't have enough good teachers as it is. Year round schools don't solve this. You still need teachers. My concern is that this is going to make it harder to keep the good teachers in the Wake County School district. I don't think all of them will leave, but some will not want to deal with the hassle of having their high school kid on a different schedule (I know I wouldn't) or packing up their stuff every 9 weeks to move to a different class, etc.
2) What if you have a kid in elementary or middle school and one in high school? Now they are on completely different schedules. The parents that can afford it are going to go to private schools. This will perpetuate the flight of the well-to-do away from public schools.
3) This is a short term fix. The Wake/Raleigh school planners need to get their act together. Stop building palatial 500-600 kid elementary schools and start building reasonable 1000 kid elementary schools. They keep talking like this is rocket science, but it really isn't. The planners just aren't very smart.
Raleigh has a history of good schools. I hope I'm wrong and that this isn't the start of the decline.
Another comment on the Raleigh art Project
The N & O, my favorite liberal rag, wrote an article last weekend on the downtown Raleigh art project. It was on the front page and went into great detail about the art project and how it was in jeopardy even though funded by $2.5 million of private money. The article never once mentioned that the project was over budget by $1.7 million. Not once. They just talked about how Raleigh was backwards and didn't want art and the busses couldn't pass under it and we're a bunch of rednecks, etc.
In typical N & O reporting style, they never once mentioned the real issue here and that is that we don't have enough money to build schools and now they want to spend an "extra" $1.7M on this art project. Why can't they do the art project for the $2.5 million? Shouldn't that be the question?
Once again, good job missing the point N & O.
In typical N & O reporting style, they never once mentioned the real issue here and that is that we don't have enough money to build schools and now they want to spend an "extra" $1.7M on this art project. Why can't they do the art project for the $2.5 million? Shouldn't that be the question?
Once again, good job missing the point N & O.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Raleigh downtown art Project
So you want to build a cool art sculpture in downtown Raleigh and some dude has given you $2.5 million to do it. No problem, right. We'll not really, you see you can't really do a cool art sculpture for $2.5 million, everybody knows this. You need, say $4.2 millions to do it right. At least if your a Spanish artist named Jaume Plensa.
So now the tax payers have to pay for it. Don't worry about the fact that we don't have enough schools and are having to all go year round next year, no don't worry about that. Worry about the poor artist who ONLY has $2.5 million to build a sculpture. THAT's the real tragedy here.
I heard some lady on the news say she was going to leave Raleigh if it wasn't approved that the tax payers pay for her sculpture. Fine. Leave. You can go live in Somalia or Rwanda or Iran for all I care, but get out of Raleigh.
So now the tax payers have to pay for it. Don't worry about the fact that we don't have enough schools and are having to all go year round next year, no don't worry about that. Worry about the poor artist who ONLY has $2.5 million to build a sculpture. THAT's the real tragedy here.
I heard some lady on the news say she was going to leave Raleigh if it wasn't approved that the tax payers pay for her sculpture. Fine. Leave. You can go live in Somalia or Rwanda or Iran for all I care, but get out of Raleigh.
