MM: Commissioner DUI, Possibility of Two Schools at Talley Street, and 56 Hilliard Doc
Decatur Metro | June 18, 2015 | 8:20 am
- Decatur Mayor Pro Tem charged with DUI [Decaturish]
- Superintendent Edwards looking at a combination school for new property [AJC]
- Decatur Mayor vows to once again seek homestead exemption bill [AJC]
- Oakview Road to be temporarily closed as streetscape improvements continue [Decatur Minute]
- Atlanta to give Park Atlanta the boot [CBS 46]
- Short documentary – Beauty & Struggle: The Story of 56 Hilliard Street [Bitter Southerner]
Map courtesy of The Decatur Minute
I am glad to see that Ms. Cunningham is taking responsibility for her actions. That is something that we should expect from everyone. I understand that she is well-liked. But as a City Commissioner and Mayor Pro Tem, Ms. Cunningham holds a position of public trust. She could have seriously injured (or killed) herself or someone else. Ms. Cunningham should resign.
I’ve never been a fan of Commissioner Cunningham and did not like the thought of her being the Mayor Pro Tem, considering it seems like a rubber stamp vote.
I agree she has openly accepted responsibility for this situation, but she should definitely resign.
“and HEY, we’re in Decatur.”
That Bitter Southerner documentary is really terrific.
+1
Y’all should become members.
Agreed. I was among last year’s founding members, with the fancy box of swag to show for it. Chuck’s my man.
You know Chuck is doing that thing with Elvis Costello at the Variety for Acapella Books?
Broken record alert, but …
A few days ago there was an article on here about CSD putting the Talley St, property under contract. There was some lively discussion about the process of planning to expand the system to accommodate the dramatic growth. Witty Name weighed in with this (in part):
Genuine question-How are those options actively being weighed? Has the school board openly discussed other configuration or planning options? Saying “we’re pursuing all available options” is often political-speak for “leave me alone.”
This article certainly leads one to believe the current superintendent is not actively weighing any options outside of the current K-3/4-5 configuration. Hopefully the Board is capable of more imaginative thinking and will look for that skill in the new superintendent, but in the meantime the Board needs to take a more active role (and maybe they are behind the scenes) in steering the ship.
As a taxpayer, I want everything on the table. People have made compelling arguments on both sides of the configuration question from an educational perspective, but it’s bigger than that. What about from a sustainability standpoint? We bus kids from all over town to the 4-5 academy at a cost in traffic (mostly due to the large number of parents who don’t/won’t put their kid on the bus) and air pollution. Not to mention the actual cost to taxpayers in transporting the students. One of the biggest bonuses of having small neighborhood schools is that kids can walk to school. The current configuration negates a sizable fraction of that advantage.
Are there bus routes from each K-3 to the 4/5? If not, there should be- that way kids can still walk to the usually close K-3 (and not have to get on a 4/5 bus super early), and then all take the bus together to the 4/5. That is how it used to work where I grew up with a K-3/4-6 system.
There are not. My child would have had to board the bus around 6:45 as opposed to leaving around 7:15 (to get there early – could have left at 7:30 or so) to get to F.AVE via car. That 30-45 minutes makes a huge difference when trying to get a 10-year old ready and out the door. We found that riding the bus was just not a practical option for our family. That said, otherwise, I like F.AVE and the 4/5 model.
This. Only where we are the F.Ave bus comes by at 6:30.
My daughter is a 3rd grader this coming year and we are (mostly) planning on her riding the bus to F.AVE next year, but that is crazy early for a 9-year-old to be up, fed, and out the door and on the bus, especially when I could leave a half an hour later and drive her there.
It would make it much easier if the bus left from our elementary school. I would love walking over with her brother and dropping off both kids with one trip.
We are on our second FAVEr to ride the bus and once the kids got used to it, it has been ok. Bedtime is by 8:30 though (late kids’ baseball games made the next morning harder).
I did like the year FAVE started at 8:45. My 4th grader walked with her brother to school and caught the bus at the stop next to the school just before 8:00. A lot of parents did not like the later release time in the afternoon, and high school students didn’t like their earlier start time that year, though.
6:45 for my rising 5th grader. Took some getting used to, but he managed fine. He even enjoyed some alone/reading time on the bus ride (once he got a flashlight for daylight savings time).
Good for y’all! It has been like pulling teeth to get my girl up at 6:15-:20 every morning so that she could move about at her natural glacial pace. I wonder how many times we’d have missed the bus if we’d been trying to catch it. 😉
I just reread my post and it sounded kinda nyah nyah…sorry about that. Wasn’t intended.
It was hard in the beginning, but somehow we lucked out. He began to get up on his own (moving the alarm clock to the other side of the room forces him to actually get up to turn it off, so that helped). Of course, there were those times when we DID have to drive him…
P.S. Like you, I think the 4/5 model is a good one. We have had mostly positive experiences. But I know several who haven’t, so I think it’s often the luck of the draw.
Oh, no worries. I wasn’t bothered. I’m sure you’re right re “luck of the draw” – both for kids willing to get their butts up and moving and for adjusting to the 4/5!
I’m surprised that with CoD’s emphasis on walking to school that bus links between the K-3 and 4/5 aren’t there already. As TopHat said, it would also keep more families together longer all headed in the same direction both to and from school. In addition to removing some school car traffic from the roads, it seems like it would also save the district money if they eliminated 4/5 busses other than the K-3 to 4/5 links from say areas w/in a mile of a K-3. It also might mean switching start times of K-3 (8am) and 4/5 (7:45) to give more time for busses to get to the 4/5, but the overall benefits seem worth the changes.
I tried to edit my comment again and ran out of time. But I wonder if it is too complicated to run buses from the K-3s as hubs as well as having enough buses taking the actual elementary students, and factoring in the families that live outside the 1-mile radius of the school still needing transportation. I am sure it’s more complicated than I am envisioning, but it would be nice to have that as an option if it were feasible.
I am sure that my kiddo can adjust and we’ll deal with whatever options are presented to us.
There was one year when there was a hub and spoke system but I cannot for the life of me remember how it worked. I’m thinking that maybe it was the first year of College Heights. On the north side, all kids who took the bus went to the Glennwood hub (then the 4/5), where some split off for College Heights, some got out at Glennwood, and some went to Clairemont. If I’m remembering this correctly, it seemed to work and families liked having siblings at different schools ride together, but it had oddities like kids on the northwest side riding past Clairemont to get to Glennwood only to ride back to Clairemont. And some folks didn’t like such a long ride for the 4 year olds going to College Heights. (My kids were always bus lovers–the longer the ride, the better–so no problem for us.)
IMHO, there’s no question that the 4/5 has a lot of merit, especially in terms of preventing cliques at Renfroe. But it is operationally more complicated when it comes to walk-/bike-ability, busing, drop-offs, and frequent changes in configuration due to rapid population shifts. Some think that the separation from K-3 is good but I sure saw some great K-5 stuff going on at the old Westchester. IB can occur with either configuration.
What is the rationale behind splitting k-5 into k-3 and 4/5?
I believe (at least in part) that the point is to better prepare students for and ease the transition to middle school. I think the team teaching they were piloting the past couple of years was a great example of this. Pairs of classes had one teacher for math/science and another for social studies/language arts. Sadly, they are having to abandon the practice because the IB governing body wouldn’t approve it. But I imagine there are other ways they 4/5 tries to mimic middle school. I know there is a big, school-wide emphasis on establishing study habits (such as keeping track of assignments in their agendas), for example.
Then there is the transition socially. There is the feeling that bringing kids together from the different schools/neighborhoods into one at 4th grade (rather than 6th) brings a more positive result as it gives them time to get to know one another before “cliques” are as much of an issue.
Thanks. I understand the emphasis on study habits, but I do wonder why that same emphasis couldn’t be promoted in the classroom at the K-5 level (even if there are little kids running around bothering the 4th and 5th graders).
As for the cliques, that’s not something I really understand. One of the great things about the previous model was that kids from 7 different elementary schools came together in one location (Renfroe) to start middle school. Sure, there were some groups of kids that stayed together and didn’t branch out, but there were just as many who branched out and made friends from different areas and different backgrounds. Also remember that a “clique” can be just as good as it can be bad. Lifelong friends are formed that go back to elementary school, and there is often a point of pride in being the “WP kids,” or the “Oakhurst kids,” etc.
It just seems like the rationale on cliques was created for a problem that may not have been an issue to begin with. (And I’m not arguing with you – I fully understand that you were just answering my question, to which I’m thankful).
The problem in the pre-4/5 days was that many of the schools only had 20 or so kids per grade (I know that Oakhurst had 99 total kids for K-5 in 2003), so they literally had the same kids in their class year after year. When they entered 6th grade they not only had to deal with a new school, they had to deal with different classmates for the first time in their life, and had to do it with raging hormones. Oh, I didn’t mention how racially divided the city was at the time? It was just natural for cliques to continue.
I still don’t see anything wrong with that scenario.
Seriously, what’s wrong with children being confronted with new experiences and new places? They have to do it at some point in their lives.
And the familiarity of having the same kids in your class year after year breeds lasting, sometimes lifelong, friendships. It also builds a network of security when you transition to middle school.
Remember also that it’s up to the kids to branch out and make new friends, and it’s up to the parents to encourage them to do so.
There were financial reasons for the change, too.
State funding formulas favor large systems . Housing all students in a given grade level in the same building was the only way for CSD to get maximum available state contribution for classroom operating funds.
With current high enrollments, it is possible that this is no longer the case. Still, BOE must think ahead to possible drops in enrollment as new students move through the system.
If we continue to look to new construction as the only way to accommodate larger enrollment, down the road we might once again find ourselves with under enrolled schools .
Yes, the district was better able to hire specialist teachers with all students in one school. Part of the 4/5 push was also that 4th grade was identified as a major time point in the widening of the learning gap– some kids just weren’t reading at needed levels by that grade, and that spiraled through the rest of the grades unless issues were caught and improved in 4/5 grades. I’d be curious to see if that has been working- I hope so.
Regardless of the configuration, I don’t believe that reading disabilities will be adequately remediated in CSD until there is more commitment to training all elementary school teachers and special ed instructors in evidence-based reading instruction. Non-specific smorgasbord reading instruction is ok for the 80% of students who learn to read easily no matter what you put in front of them but not for the one in five students who need scientifically proven instructional methods for learning to decode and recode written language. So much has been recently discovered about the neuroscience of written language that it is a shame not to use it fully. Families with knowledge and means will try to supplement what their students don’t get in school. The achievement gap is widened if some families don’t have that knowledge and/or the means to provide remediation outside of the classroom.
Th current configuration was enacted to combat the fact that Decatur schools were segregated. It, along with radical demographic changes in Oakhurst, worked! Now we are faced with a new challenge. To face this challenge, everything should be on the table.
How exactly did it work? By that logic, it appears as though we created an entire system that we were trying to avoid in the first place. Now the City of Decatur is 75 percent white.
The reconfiguration also included closing Westchester which prompted re-districting of white kids north of the tracks to Oakhurst Elem. Some might argue that this accelerated the demographic changes in Oakhurst. Bottom line is you are exactly correct – there is no longer racial segregation in Decatur schools because large numbers of black families in Oakhurst have been replaced with white families.
You’ve chosen the correct word: accelerated. Truth of the matter from someone who was here, from the 90s into the 00s leading up to the reconfiguration, demographic changes were definitely taking place in Oakhurst, but they were occurring slowly. There was nothing pushing back on these changes and it’s reasonable to believe that their pace would have continued and picked up during the housing boom, but the reconfiguration was like an amplifier. Suddenly Oakhurst was on the radar as an option for people who could be termed “risk averse” (which is to say, the conventional home buying market).
And now we’re accelerating at an even faster pace, so much so that long time Decaturites can’t afford to stay in their homes. It seems like we should turn the focus to leveling off, before diversity and history are both pushed out.
Don’t get me wrong, the positive change that has occurred in Decatur since the ’80s far outweighs the negatives. But we do at least need to be aware of what these changes are doing to our community before every neighborhood ends up the same – we are slowly becoming a city full of $800k homes.
“When someone describes themselves as a taxpayer, they’re about to be…” – Demetri Martin
I absolutely love the parkmobile app and use it all the time to park in COD and the City of Atlanta.
I absolutely hate Park Atlanta and strongly encourage the City of Atlanta to dump them as enforcers when the contract is up. Their aggressive enforcement (standing over cars and issuing a ticket the second the parking expires) is unfriendly and leaves people with a very bad taste in their mouths about Atlanta, and they are unreasonable and unsympathetic when parking machines/signs are broken and missing. I can think of few companies I hate more than Park Atlanta.
Seems to me the school situation would have been better off if the original model stayed the way it was – Westchester, Clairemont, College Heights, Oakhurst, Fifth Avenue, Glennwood, and Winnona Park as our seven K-5 elementary schools, Renfroe as our 6-8 middle school, and Decatur as our 9-12 high school.
It seems to me that each of those properties could have been expanded during a growth time, if needed.
The past 10 (maybe more) years we continue to see schools morph from one use to another (k-5 to k-3 or 4/5), often at the expense of the walkability of the neighborhoods.
My vote, and I know I don’t really get one, is to move back to the original model, expand those schools if needed, and add one school if it is really needed.
I can’t keep the back and forth straight.
Decatur Housing Authority is selling the large clean parcel at 336 W Trinity Pl. It sits between Electric and Commerce . I wonder why this is not being considered – if it is I haven’t heard about it. Perhaps the city wants more commercial development next to the Callaway development.
Someone more inside will have to say for sure but, as I’ve heard it, the redevelopment of all the other DHA units in that area is being paid for, in part, by what happens with that parcel. To that end, I’ve heard the DHA is looking to both sell and co-develop it to maximize the returns. A sale to CSD would only provide land money.
Anyone closer to the process able to shed any light?
School space above commercial space sounds like a great combo to me- we may be able to save on land costs, avoid enviro issues, and if school there, then no apts generating more kids.
This is what I understood.
Also, all the downtown planning I’ve seen has included making Trinity a “second main street”. Ground-floor commercial at that corner – along with the Callaway redevelopment – would help make that happen.
Ugh. It’s official: AJC.com is THE worst website ever. Every time I click onto a link going there, I regret it almost immediately. Who on earth designed that fiasco??? *rant over*
I find it amazingly bad too. And it’s no better if you have a subscription and get to go to myajc.com. It cannot be good for the bottom line to have a website that is both dysfunctional and infuriating. I have almost cancelled our subscription several times out of spite but I am addicted to doing the puzzles on newspaper print; can’t adapt yet to all online. Eventually I’ll just cancel, read DM, Decaturish, and NPR, and get a subscription to the NYT instead.
Thanks AH and Cuba-free. I love my A JC home delivery (with the WSJ) and web subscription. I like reading the paper on line around 5:00 am like all the pajama boys. And you get to ready early what Maureen Downey and Bill Banks have discovered about schools, Decatur and baseball at Glenlake Park (thats a shout out to Coach Banks).
Life is good on the old dirt road. All of Decatur should enjoy success while we can. Change is coming.
PS- Still waiting for power and ac.
…and you get to READ…”
Thank you GA Power!