Karen Bowen: Coming to Grips with Tradeoffs

Organizations make decisions every day, and every decision is accompanied by trade offs. This is probably nowhere more true than in a school district. Here's a list of some of the trade offs that our district is making:

Deciding between small elementary schools close to neighborhoods in favor of larger schools that offer more educational opportunity.

Allow special education students to receive services in schools closer to their homes rather than being bused across the district.

Larger elementary schools allow for educational opportunity for students and staff that does not now exist in small buildings.

Closing buildings which are not conducive to 21st century education.

Changing a boundary to bring students from West to North instead of having high schools of unequal size (or at least having one building overcrowded and the other bordering on the underutilized)

Is socioeconomics an issue?

Should the district continue to try to satisfy everyone, or make a decision and move forward?

Should we think outside the box in terms of grade configuration or remain in the traditional format, even if this means we can't achieve some of our other objectives?

These are just some of the trade offs people are being asked to consider, and there is no question: change is difficult. It has been said that people are not really afraid of change, they are really afraid of what they might lose. The key to helping people come to grips with these trade offs is to show the educational advantages to making them, as well as what might be lost down the road if we do not.

Whether the community is willing to accept these changes or not is another matter. It's been my experience that some people are willing to move on and others are not. The emotional impact of anything involving our children is easy to understand, but someone needs to make decisions based on the good of the district for the long term. Probably the best way to makes such decisions is for the board to be as united as possible and to implement the plan as soon as possible so that people have time to adjust to it. Whether this will happen or not remains to be seen.