I see a better plan in giving well defined “permanent” zones (such as the circles) and incorporating open zoning where circles overlap and geographic barriers such as rivers force travel through another zone. Zones that are low in student numbers can use open enrollment and tax (and other) incentives to encourage higher enrollment into that school.

I see another alternative in developing smaller community schools for reading, writing, and arithmetic while using the mega schools for chemistry, computers, foreign language, band, etc. The students would attend the community schools 3 days a week and the mega school 2 days a week or something similar.

Even Farragut proposed a “thinking out of the box” solution when it was suggested that the school acquire the old Kmart building and/or do split days where half the school population started earlier in the day and left earlier, and the other half of the school population started later and left later in the day.

I call it a 10 year disaster simply because other options do not seem to have been considered. In the meeting, Mullins said this was the only plan. The lame power point presentation was also deemed the only paperwork. That is paperwork without traffic impact studies (freely available from UT), charts of justifications of numbers, and so forth. It is a plan made without involvement of the teachers and communities that would be impacted. The plan should have been created via coalition not administration. I have worked in many organizations that were a plan of such magnitude supported with such weak documentation and lack of study that the proposer would have been laughed out of a job. With such resources as UT and DOD related consulting agencies like SAIC and Becttle Jacobs et al, we could have easily pulled together coalition members that would have encouraged appropriate studies and documentation to support the end decisions.

It is a 10 mistake because what has been presented to the public appears adhoc, based on MPC data that to many seems flawed and inaccurate, and admittedly short lived. This plan is a bandaid, not a fix.

But if you believe it will be a 10-year disaster, then it certainly will become a 10-year disaster. And subconsciously you’ll see to it that it is a disaster, instead of taking the lumps and making something good come out of it – which will happen anyway, because you have good kids and not everyone in the school system are evil ogres bent on total destruction.

There’s that self-fulfilling prophecy thing you have to be careful of. If you believe a thing will occur, then it probably will.

And you know, if worse comes to worse, move back into the Bearden district. If going to West will premeditate a 10-year disaster, then just move to a new neighborhood. Surely that’s less disruptive in the big picture.

Apologies, but that’s how I see it…