Board Meeting: Count(r)y Style

     As all of us resident bloggers must do, I had the fortune of attending a School Board Meeting last night.  Mine was a bit different, however, as it was at "the Greenwood Campus" and it turned into a date with Robby Apple Bassler.  As you may have guessed by now, my meeting was of the Baltimore County variety, a fact that made me unsure of what to expect.  After explaining the assignment to fellow teachers at my school, I was told (following a period of bewilderment/confusion about the reasoning behind it) to either a) bring NO-DOZ with me or b) not go.  Needless to say, I followed neither directive.

     While wading through the rigamarole that seems to be the trademark of every school-affiliated meeting everywhere, I hunkered down for what I assumed would be a long and tedious meeting.  During the 'open-mic' (my term, not BCPS') time, however, I began to notice an interesting pattern: each speaker was both older, and each was vehemently opposed to the construction of a certain elementary school near Mays Chapel.  I quickly and surreptitiously googled "mays+chapel+school" on my smartphone, only to find this article.  My smartphone then died, however at that point I was able to connect this nugget to the overcrowded nature of the meeting and to the presence of a news truck in the parking lot.  After listening to the citizen's arguments and to the position of the board, I came home to do more research.

     I discovered that the elementary schools in the Hampden and Stoneleigh neighborhoods are severely overcrowded, and the solution that BCPS has proposed and will most likely follow through with is to build a new school on the site of a park that they have owned for 26 years.  As I saw both in the article and at the meeting, many of the retired citizens were enraged that "their park" was being "taken away" from them, and they demanded that another course of action be sought.  In his analysis, the President of the Board noted that he too lives in this neighborhood, and that he had heard a number of suggestions during the past few days (Robby and I particularly enjoyed the idea of "buying an abandoned school in the city and using it"; we deemed this questionably-legal at best).  Despite the wishes of the retirees, the President announced that construction was all but guaranteed to happen.  

     After this debacle, I cannot help but think about the perception of our schools within our communities.  Despite the fact that BCPS had purchased this land with this intent 2 years before any of the current neighboring condos even had blueprints, these people wanted nothing to do with a school.  They didn't care that finding another option would be expensive at a time when schools like mine (in year 2 of restructuring) had their budgets cut by more than 50% in the summer of 2011.  They also did not think it relevant that the nature and intent of the park's owner was outlined in the leases that they signed (who reads those things anyway, right?  RIGHT?....).  The lack of concern for and dismissal of a school by these citizens was very upsetting and, unfortunately, largely indicative of a majority of the mindsets regarding our schools.  If we want to change the outcomes of our students' educations inside our buildings, then we must also change the minds of those watching from outside our buildings.  

(P.S.  This post has gotten too long, but the most disconcerting of all was the fact that people get bent out of shape about issues like these, yet no one blinks when a school like mine is egregiously underfunded due to the County's decision to 'eliminate' Title I middle school funding.  I guess I'll save that for another post.)