Board Meeting Comments

This feels like board is hoping to grab data for a political agenda while claiming it's best for kids. Why are we doing this again? 88K? Please don't bother with Lean Frog if the political goal is close and consolidate schools. It's 2024, we know better. Trust the actual experts instead of paying folks to tell us what we want to hear. According to a leading expert Professor Eve Ewing, "The argument that school closings can be good because students will end up in better schools is theoretically possible. But research suggests that this happens only for students who find themselves relocating to top-tier schools, which turns out to be a very small percentage, and those children on average have to go pretty far from home to get to the new school. The reality is that students who experience school closure end up at new schools that are not thriving academically, so they don’t receive any boost or improvement in their education." Bottom line: closures and consolidations don't work.

Please hold this off. It just feels disrespectful after everything that has happened for the board to continue to nudge this way. The lack of transparency is abhorrent. There is no reason to spend 80K AGAIN with this firm for an agenda when we won’t address the true causes of enrollment declines, such as poverty, decades of toxic-staff at some sites, and for example: the lack of accountable on the magnet office for starting up so-called magnet schools in multiple locations but failing to sufficiently attract enough middle class students to boost test scores. The over emphasis on the “good magnets” fails to address the programs left to rot as the predatory magnet leadership preys upon more sites for big ideas with little accountabily and supervision. These consultants aren't going to really see causes of the issues. We do need to talk about struggling schools, but we cannot have those conversations without asking unpopular tough questions and actually going instead the communitie