MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 23 June 2007
The future of Fayetteville High School
The
Fayetteville School Board ran into a pack of trouble a couple of weeks ago at a
public feedback session on the future of Fayetteville High School. The session focused on the board's
upcoming decision about whether their planned single huge high school should go
on the school system's 100-acre lot in the northwest
suburbs beyond Interstate 540, or on the mid-town site of the present school.
The
board might have received more feedback than it bargained for. Fully 15 of the 22 speakers favored the
central location, only four favored the suburban location, while three
expressed no opinion. Although
School Board President Steve Percival explained that the single mega-school
decision was completed and not up for discussion, most of the 15 expressed
dismay at this decision.
The
board made a mistake last February by opting for one mega-school. A large and consistent body of research
shows that schools of 500-1000 students are best on the basis of academic achievement (surely the main criterion), student
attitudes, truancy, criminal behavior, gangs, extracurricular participation,
attendance, dropout rate, interpersonal relations, and teacher attitudes.
This
conclusion comes across loud and clear in Kathleen Cotton's big survey (of 106
published research papers) "School Size, School
Climate, and Student Performance," in John Slate and Craig Jones' survey
(of nearly 100 research papers) "Effects of School Size," and
Lawrence Picus' "An Evidence-Based Approach to School Finance Adequacy in
Arkansas." These studies,
which you can find on the web, cannot be ignored by the board. If the board discounts this massive
evidence, they need to explain why.
With our kids' educations at stake, we cannot just fly by the seat of
our pants.
Football
seems to be the real driver for the one-school decision. Some folks want to maintain the
school's 7A sports classification, which will be lost if we go to two smaller
schools. Incredibly, many school officials,
board members, and citizens have brought up this completely irrelevant
issue. No wonder Arkansas, and
America, lags in education.
Present
plans are for a single 3000-student school, fully three times larger than the
recommended 1000-student maximum.
The enrollment projection for year 2011, when a new high school might be
ready, is 2700. A school for 3000
will be nearly full the day it's opened, so a second high school will have to
be in the planning stages by then.
This
mega-school mistake will be greatly compounded if it's built out beyond
Interstate 540 rather than in the middle. At the input session, several
speakers favoring the central location mentioned City Plan 2025. This plan was developed by hundreds of
citizens working with a fine "new urbanist" planning team. It's built around six excellent
principles of which the first is promoting infill and the second is
discouraging sprawl. We will fly
in the face of both goals if we locate Fayetteville's single high school in a
far corner of town out beyond the Chinese Wall represented by the I-540
bypass. This location is the
opposite of infill, and will
attract sprawling development.
A
nice geometric calculation shows that the median (roughly the average) high
school commute, for parents, students, and teachers, will be doubled by placing
the school in a far corner of town as compared with placing it in the
center. Here's the calculation, in
case you're interested:
Imagine a square with a dot in the center and a dot in the NW
corner. Assume the population
density is the same all over this square, and zero outside. Visualize a circle around the center
that includes half the area of the square, and a quarter-circle around the
corner that also includes half the area of the square. Since the area of a circle is
proportional to the square of its radius, the radius of the quarter-circle will
have to be twice as large as the radius of the full circle. "QED," as they say.
So
vehicle-miles traveled to and from school will be doubled. Using reasonable numbers for a
3000-student school, I estimate that the extra driving caused by the suburban
school (as compared with the central school) is 4 million vehicle-miles per
year. This extra travel will
consume 200,000 gallons of gasoline every year, pump 2500 tons of
globally-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, and cost $2
million in driving costs every year.
It will cause an average of 4 extra traffic injuries every year and one
extra fatality every 15 years, most probably of young people (whose accident
rate is significantly higher).
The
board's estimate showing the suburban location to be cheaper is highly
misleading, because it omits the cost of the second school that will be
required right after the mega-school opens. Any real plan for the future must include the cost of this
second school. The so-called
"single-school decision" that was made last February is really a
two-school decision, with the first school having 3000 students and the second
school delayed until right after the first school opens.
So
we'll have two new schools in any case.
Rather than one 3000-student school followed by a second school, I
suggest that we immediately plan for two schools of about 2000 each. This number seems a reasonable
compromise between 3000 and the ideal 1000-student upper limit suggested by all
the studies. With a 4000-student
capacity, we'd be set for the next 18 years (assuming a 2 percent growth
rate).
I'm
a fervent supporter of public education, but a mega-school out beyond the
bypass would be impossible for me to vote for.