Get involved in community forums

Being an active participant in your community should be encouraged and should happen globally, but if you're breathing and awake you know this is not the case. Select members of the population are recognized as political subjects and valid participants in "democracy." Some people are able to speak louder than others and their voices easily reach the ears of those who have a certain kind of power that is used to dominate and subjugate. Authentic community involvement in which community members are both the leading visionaries and decision-makers is grossly discouraged. Case in point: AISD's Facilities Master Plan Task Force.

With that in mind, I attended a "community meeting" tonight in which members of our local school district's Facilities Master Plan Task Force congregated to receive community input regarding their recent suggestions to close at least nine AISD schools (eight elementary schools, one middle school) for the sake of "efficiency." These measures would allegedly maximize efficiency in that they would shuffle students to different schools and re-draw school boundaries in order to decrease the number of empty seats in a school. The task force's plans also call for the construction of three new elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school in the suburbs in order to meet the needs of the growing population in those areas and the forecasts for a decrease in the population in the centrally-located schools.

Although this is just the beginning, the arguments that I feared would be heavily used were in fact popular. Some community members rejected the closures of all of the schools while most spoke about a specific school and argued against that particular school's closure. What is especially frustrating to these parents is that there is talk that their school may be closed despite its being "exemplary."

(1) How is exemplary defined in AISD? Every school district uses different metrics in order to avoid incurring the wrath of NCLB/high-stakes-testing-related penalties.
(2) If a school is NOT "exemplary," does that justify its being put on the chopping block?

By arguing over which school is more or less worthy of getting the axe, the real culprits are not placed under the microscope and criticized for their failure to educate all children. In any case, all of these happenings are new to me and I'll do my best to play catch-up before classes start next week. I plan on attending tomorrow night's community forum as well and hearing what other folks have to say. My connection to this issue is personal in that I'm an Austinite, I went to one of the elementary schools that might be closed, and the junior high I attended is also under scrutiny. I'm interested in better understanding what accounts for the apparent drop in student enrollment in centrally-located schools and the growth in suburban-area schools.