The large turnout touted on the press release for the Council for Educational Facility Planners International’s 9th Celebration of Progress never materialized. Good thing.
It’s not often the school district gets props. Why spoil it?
See, the district builds schools at an amazing clip—“We’re the school of the month club,” event host Elaine Wynn joked last Tuesday. Eleven campuses are scheduled to open for the 2007-08 academic year. Wow, such productivity!
School trustee Ruth Johnson told the crowd of 150 spread around 1,900 seats in Cashman Theater that the district’s building program is a national model.
Superintendent Walt Rulffes went on about how teamwork (between taxpayers, school administrators and architects) makes it possible to accommodate our meteoric growth—314,000 students will matriculate in ’07-’08, a year-over-year increase of 12,000.
Then he passed out thank-yous. To taxpayers for approving 1998’s $3 billion school construction and campus modernization bond. (By 2010, Johnson said, 101 schools will have been built and 11 refurbished.) To district oversight groups for keeping projects on track and on budget. Lastly, to the architects. Several sat on stage with other dignitaries.
Students danced. Framed pictures of the new schools were handed out to principals, family members and, in one case, the namesakes themselves. And yet there was no permeating sense of festiveness. Nor should there have been.
Why back-pat bureaucrats and architects for building schools with monies allotted for building schools? That hardly strikes us as the “progress” our city should gather to celebrate. Dozens upon dozens of campuses are struggling to meet federal benchmarks; many kids are still struggling under brainless federal mandates, inadequate state funding, mediocre parental commitment and other problems. Solve those things, and then we’ll have a national model worthy of the press releases.