I'm a parent of an 18 year old daughter who's a Real Millennial (born in 2000) who graduated from APS and who's in her first year at a state university. I was a PTA parent for several years, and as my daughter went through the grades I became more and more unhappy with the total Democratic control over Arlington's public schools. To the extent I will NEVER vote for a Democrat who's running for election or re-election to Arlington's School Board. Certainly not Barbara Kanninen.
Like other APS parents I had to keep my mouth shut while my daughter attended APS. No longer.
To say I was unhappy that my daughter attended class in a trailer classroom while a hundred parents who moved out of Arlington dropped their kids off at my daughter's school in the morning and picked them up in the evening (usually after extended school day activities) would be an understatement. Then there was (and is) the secret APS program that's relocated hundreds of children whose parents were and are economic (not political) refugees from Central America to Arlington. Then there was and is the traffic through my neighborhood because APS allows parents who live a block from a school to drive their kids to school and builds big turn-arounds to facilitate that. Then there are the Taj Mahal schools themselves, built with every amenity that has little or nothing to do with education but too few classrooms.
But what really aggravated me and other parents was that, no matter how many relocatable classrooms, no matter how much traffic, no matter what the costs are imposed on students, parents, taxpayers, everyone, neither the County Board nor the School Board would let go of in-fill urbanizing the County. Every year, more of the same.
Latest Taj Mahal schools will cost $130 million. When will it end? All we wanted was a good basic pre-K through 12 education for my daughter. She didn't receive one because APS is all about sports-entertainment-recreation aka 'enrichment activities'.
Thanks for this blog.
Mike P
