Best of a bad situation

APS to close 10 schools under plan for new boundaries | ajc.com
Atlanta Public Schools will close 10 schools and eliminate about 5,500 of 13,000 extra seats under the final redistricting proposal released Saturday by Superintendent Erroll Davis.
The proposal, which goes to the school board for a vote on April 10, reduces the number of elementary and middle schools with less than 450 students from 38 to 17. The plan also organizes schools in a "cluster" format, where groups of elementary schools feed into the same middle and high school.

The "school cluster" idea, where each high school anchors a group of middle and elementary schools that feed into it, seems so obvious that I have to wonder why APS wasn't already doing it. Previously, elementary and middle schools were organized into four "School Reform Teams", and all city high schools were in their own, separate Team. This led to a mess where vertical continuity didn't exist. Even within an individual school, some elementary students moved upward into one middle school, some into another. Madness.

But I realize that reorganization is not what this announcement is about: That decision has already been made, and about time too. This is about closing schools. And really, there are very few surprises in this final recommendation. Most of the schools that are scheduled to close have been named on most of the previous drafts, although there's a little variation in exactly where the new zone boundaries are drawn.

Here are the surprises:

STAYING OPEN:

• Coan Middle
• Humphries Elementary
• Thomasville Heights Elementary
• Whitefoord Elementary

Coan's parents mounted a vocal opposition to closing the school and using the building as a "6th grade academy" extension of Inman. Coan survives, sort of, because the Coan students will temporarily be at the (closed) East Lake Elementary building, because of the domino effect of temporarily closing Jackson High for renovations in 2012-13 and moving the student body to the Coan building. In 2013-14, Jackson and Coan return home.

Whitefoord remains open, and will get a few of the displaced Cook students, whose building will become the Inman 6th grade academy instead of Coan. If you've seen Inman Middle, you know they just don't have any room for nearby expansion. And as we've heard over the past two months, not one Inman parent will willingly send a child anywhere else. We'll see how they feel about their 6th graders being sent to Cook.

Thomasville Heights and Humphries are just plain mystery gifts. They were on every list to close. I've heard speculation, possibly unworthy, that Thomasville remains open because no other school will take their students. The Cook kids's influence will be diluted between Centennial Place, Hope-Hill, Parkside and Whitefoord: There's no similar provision to be made for Thomasville Heights, which appears doomed to be the APS' bad example.

And Humphries remains open, it appears, for the opposite reason: Although smaller than APS would like, they're performing so much better than the other schools in their cluster. Sometimes you just don't dare fix something that doesn't appear to be broken.

CLOSING:

• D.H. Stanton Elementary

D.H. Stanton (don't forget the initials: There's an F.L. Stanton as well) wasn't on any of the previous lists to close, but many of its parents begged Davis to close the building before it collapsed.

See also:
East Atlanta Patch: Davis' Final APS Redistricting Plan: Keep Coan Middle And Whitefoord Elementary Open
APS: Superintendent’s Final Redistricting and Closure Recommendations (PDF)

LATER: Oops, I seem to have neglected a couple of surprises, schools that were on one list all along, now moved to the other with no warning.
STAYING OPEN: Boyd Elementary
CLOSING: Towns Elementary
Given where they both are (northwest Atlanta, near Douglass High), it could be as simple as a flip of the coin between them. Just as it could be that D.H. Stanton must die that Thomasville Heights might live.