The bilingual Key Elementary School in Arlington County as another example of the "upsidedownness" of community planning

October is National Community Planning Month and this year I mean to write a post "in honor" but it will also include a discussion of some of the structural problems I see in the field.

Monday's Washington Post has an article, "In Northern Va., a fight over moving a bilingual school stirs questions of race and class," about Key Elementary School in Arlington County, Virginia.  As the community around the school changed, they created a Spanish-language immersion program there, which also became popular with Anglos.  At the same time the school became a key community anchor for the Latino community.

But as the Columbia Pike corridor has gone through redevelopment, intensification, and housing price appreciation, fewer Latino families live in the area, and it's harder for Arlington Public Schools to fill the native language spots in the various grades, while the non-Hispanic seats are oversubscribed.

So the system looks to relocate the bilingual language immersion program.  But the still remaining Latinos in the area don't support this, because of how the school anchors the community, even if it's shrinking.

In 2011, I wrote some pieces about this in relation to other similar examples, and that community planning/neighborhood planning, because too often it fails to recognize that local schools are the building blocks of neighborhoods, gets planning backwards.

-- "One way in which community planning is completely backwards
-- "Missing the most important point about Clifton School closure in Fairfax County"
-- "Rethinking community planning around maintaining neighborhood civic assets and anchors"

Below is a compilation of the argument, which is relevant to the Key Elementary School situation.  What I would do is create another language immersion program and locate it elsewhere.

And at the same time, for community social development reasons, Arlington County should provide funds to the school system to better support the non-school community development functions that Key Elementary School provides to the Latino community and the Columbia Pike corridor.

(Note that APS has another Spanish language immersion elementary school, Claremont.)

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I hate to be put in the position of agreeing with Washington Examiner editorial writer Barbara Hollingsworth, of whom I normally have the tendency to excoriate, but her piece, "Fairfax school officials to review closing Clifton Elementary," on the closure of a community school serving a rural section of Fairfax County, illustrates a problem that we have in cities also, when decisions to close schools based on enrollment levels or the cost to rehabilitate the school end up having devastating impacts on the quality of neighborhood-community life. 

The Washington Post also has a long piece on Clifton School, "Closure shuts many doors," focusing on the community-connectedness, volunteerism, and involvement of the community within the school and outside of the school deriving in part from the way that the school knits the community together.

I joke sometimes that "offices of planning" aren't really in charge of "planning," but instead are "offices of land use development" because virtually all of the "planning" done by the other government agencies isn't coordinated by the office of planning and/or never comes before the office for substantive comment.

A key example is schools planning, which for the most part, is the domain of the local public school system, with limited input from other agencies, including the office of planning.

As far as delivering educational programs that's fine.  (Well, it isn't, but that's another story.)

But the problem is the disconnect between the reality that schools, especially elementary schools, are the basic building block and foundation of quality neighborhoods and local community.

Schools  are the fulcrum of community activity in so many places, and provide the means for people to meet and interact within communities outside of strict propinquity--meaning you have a chance to meet and become friends with a wide variety of people, not just the people you live next door to or across the street from.

It might just be, despite the fact that most households don't have children, that without a high quality neighborhood elementary school, you don't have a high quality neighborhood, and as importantly there are fewer connections between households, because of the lack of a civic connector.

Just like I believe that transportation planning needs to be done at two levels: (1) at the metropolitan level, setting requirements for network breadth and depth, level of service standards for the network and specific services; and (2) at the level of transit operations; schools planning should not solely be the domain of the school system, because schools aren't only about delivering education programs, but also  neighborhood strengthening qualities and programs.

The issue involved here, from a planning perspective, is the maintenance of community institutions as building blocks for neighborhoods and sustainable transportation systems.

In short:

Schools are fundamental anchors which build and maintain quality neighborhoods and communities. Therefore to maintain communities we need to maintain the schools located within them.

My point is that maintaining healthy neighborhoods is too important a task to have only the school system be responsible for schools planning.

Therefore, the community's land use, neighborhood, and economic development planning initiatives need to be co-equal in planning so that all neighborhoods are served by at least one quality public elementary school.

And if the the costs for running a neighborhood school are greater than the system average, then it is reasonable to "subsidize" the school's costs from non-school funding sources.

For example, in my neighborhood, which is gaining households with children, I don't know any families that send their children to the local elementary school, which is five blocks away.  Mostly, their children go to charter schools or private day care.  Although I guess people with children (and the people who live next door to them) end up meeting other families with children throughout the neighborhood because when they are out walking with their children, the kids end up being a "social bridge" that ease the process of meeting and making others' acquaintance.

In Baltimore County, the school system and the parks and recreation department have had for at least 50 years a memorandum of understanding about joint use of public school facilities for recreation programs.

In practice, that means that schools are used for more hours of the day and that the County doesn't need two different buildings to serve different functions.  At the same time, certain school facilities such as gyms and auditoriums may be "overbuilt" so that they also can handle larger community functions, but that the money to pay for this comes in part from the Department of Recreation and Parks.

This idea needs to be extended so that a base number of schools are designated as what we might call "neighborhood foundation" schools, and the resources provided to the school would be funded in part for neighborhood stabilization and resident attraction and marketing purposes, meaning that some funds to maintain the schools in such places would come from outside of the budget of the school system.

Schools as cultural centers. WRT this last point, I haven't written about it yet, but just as I frequently mention the concept that neighborhood libraries should also serve simultaneously as culture centers ("Update: Neighborhood libraries as nodes in a neighborhood and city-wide network of cultural assets, the same could be said of schools.

The way that the Escuela Key anchors the Latino community in the Columbia Pike neighborhoods is an example.