Comments on: Decatur High Principal Addresses Earlier Start Time; AJC’s Downey Responds

By: TOK

TOK — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:11:06 +0000

Eliza Stone-Cribb was the high school student. Eloquent and heartfelt.

By: karass

karass — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:35:07 +0000

+ 1

I already have a slogan: Garrett cares, Garrett shares (data).

By: MrFixIt

MrFixIt — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:29:03 +0000

OMG – Garrett, you lost me in the last paragraph, but sure… go ahead and do that geo-spatial SQL thingy. Garrett for school board!

By: karass

karass — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:15:30 +0000

I wonder about the 55% athletics participation rate too. It seems high, especially at the high school level and especially because ninth grade and middle school teams have been cut. On the other hand, athletics do seem to include a higher proportion of students than they used to, with lots of girls’ teams and a wider range of sports beyond football and basketball, e.g. swimming, cross-country, lacrosse, soccer, etc. I’d like to know:
1. Is all of that 55% made up of school teams or are other kinds of participation being included, e.g. PE courses, Decatur Rec, conditioning leading up to tryouts.
2. Is that a true percentage (# of students participating in a school sport/#students or did someone just add up the number of players on all the teams and divide by the student body count. The latter yields an inaccurately high percentage because it double counts students who participate on more than one team.
3. What is the proportion by grade? I suspect that it is higher in middle school and lower with each increasing grade because of the competitiveness of the teams.
4. Just for fun, what is the proportion by sex? I’m sure the disparity between girls and boys is decreasing…hence our awesome girls teams!

By: Garrett Goebel

Garrett Goebel — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:03:47 +0000

I’m reminded of the Dilbert strip “Anything I don’t understand is easy to do…” (http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Understand%20Easy)

Just fielding your last question on issues related to mixing primary, middle, and/or high school students on the bus… Puberty and isolating kids before, during, and after is the usual argument. It also happens to reflect the fact that we do the same thing by having elementary, middle, and high schools.

I know at least one middle school bus driver who segregates her bus by grade with youngest at the front working to oldest at the back. -Which is the typical self-segregating experience I recall growing up…

Adding a question of my own… Would it be possible to revisit the number and spacing of bus stops? Back when we all walked 5 miles uphill both ways rain, sleet, or snow… I recall elementary school students walking up to 1/4 mile to get to their bus stop. A google maps fact check on my memory confirms it. I don’t know, but I’d be curious to learn what are the maximum preferred and allowed distances between stops for elementary, middle, and high school students?

Dig… Dig… Dig…

Georgia Code provides a maximum: “The standard walking distance to trunk bus routes shall not be more than one-half mile. In addition to the standard walking distance, walk route conditions, road conditions and satisfactory turnaround places shall be considered in planning spur routes.” (http://www.gadoe.org/_documents/doe/legalservices/160-5-3-.10.pdf)

Preferred distances are found in an Minnesota school district example in a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) publication dated July 1, 2010: Selecting School Bus Stop Locations: A Guide for School Transportation Professional (http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/buses/pdf/SelectingSchoolBusStopLocations.pdf):

“Transportation Department guidelines for walking to a bus stop are .1 mile for kindergarten, .2 mile elementary, and .3 mile for secondary students. However, if it is more economical when developing bus routes to increase the distance from the home to the bus stop, these guidelines will not apply and students may walk longer distances to bus stops.”

I wonder where we fall with regards to these guidelines for elementary, middle, and high school students?

I have an open-source PostgreSQL database capable and optimized for doing geo-spatial queries with genetic query optimization for these kinds of Traveling Salesman problems. I’m not particularly experience in this area, but I could follow the paths others have documented to try to capture the possibilities and constraints weighting relative factors and producing comparisons of current and proposed solutions. Or better yet, I imagine there are probably already several folks in our community who have considerable experience in this area and would be willing to help out. In which case, I’d be happy to work with the school district to help them get the data into a format with which our community experts are comfortable working.