It took awhile, and you have to unwrap multiple tissue-paper layers of courteous language to find it, but parents throughout out neighborhood are finally saying this to APS:
Forget about ANY plans involving busing our kids out of their current school zone. Not ever gonna happen. Slow down, start over, and by the way, we'll be bringing our own demographers to this next round of talks. (Okay, parents haven't said that yet--but they will).
Let's fast-forward through the next part of the dialogue, the part that is about to happen:
APS: We have to find $65M in savings somewhere, and we have to relieve overcrowding, and the fair way--the obvious way--is to move kids from crowded schools to schools where there's space.
PARENTS: We understand the problem, but you must take busing off the table. We won't do it.
APS: The schools are safe, the transportation can be managed, and the performance of the schools will improve once your kids are there.
PARENTS: We are not going to bus our kids away from the schools we've worked hard to build into schools that we don't think can ever be made to meet our standards for academic achievement and especially student comportment.
APS: If you don't agree to busing, our only recourse will be to cut staff, damaging schools.
PARENTS: Cut the bloat in central office, not teachers and staff at schools.
APS: This "bloat" you imagine we have--we don't really have it. We can't cut enough central office staff to erase the deficit. We will have to cut teachers, janitors, nurses and school staff. You'll have more kids in dirty classrooms with no nurses, no specials, no extras. Or you can have clean classrooms, extras and specials--but you'll be riding the bus.
PARENTS: We will not tolerate any further degradation of the school experience. No cuts in teachers or crucial staff; no elimination of specials, honors classes, AP, or anything like that.
APS: We can't raise property taxes, because families unaffected by all of this would never go along with that. They would just call you a bunch of spoiled, privileged white folk who won't compromise.
PARENTS: Agreed. No property tax hike.
APS: We're sorry, but you've given us no workable option.
(A frosty silence ensues).
Well, here's a workable option:
Pursue a bailout.
If GM can get one; if some banks are "too big to fail," then certainly in the world of intown Atlanta, APS is too big to fail.
So: who's going to bail us out, and why should we feel justified in asking?
Let's tackle that second question first.
There's a deficit because of Bev Hall's mismanagement (with the BOE complicit; it failed to watchdog Hall, with disastrous results; how did a projected $65 million budget deficit not pop onto anybody's radar screen until Hall had already snatched her last bonus check and fled to Kauai? How did the BOE not know about this MUCH sooner?)--
--AND because APS is paying a fortune to teachers it fired and must put through the due-process mechanism. (If you add up the AJC's numbers, the HR cost of the cheating scandal will exceed $10 million).
There are other reasons, such as APS having to overpay for wireless and other technology (the "e-Rate" scandal) and the horrible inefficiency of the special ed program, a swamp Errol Davis is just now beginning to drain....and of course the cost of providing too many non-educators with cushy jobs at the Trinity building.
But who here wants to argue with me that the taxpayers of APS were defrauded by the Beverly Hall regime on a massive scale. Anyone?
If it had just been sloppiness and bad record-keeping, we'd have no moral right to ask for outside help. But we were literally cheated.
That doesn't mean anyone has to help us, but it sure means we don't have to feel bad about asking.
What would happen if we went to the state lawmakers representing this area and insisted they at least draft legislation that would cover the part of the deficit resulting from the cheating scandal--all the HR and legal costs, basically. We could certainly see that a bill was introduced.
What if we then went to every foundation, every donor, every federal muckety-muck, and said, please help us this once, and we'll pledge never to let ourselves get caught in the perfect storm of a person like Hall and a BOE like...well, like our current BOE.
There is no guarantee anyone would help us, but I think we can make a convincing case that a one-time bailout is appropriate.
You know who won't help us with this effort? APS. They want to use this opportunity to social-engineer quality in some of their 2nd-tier schools by moving around good students and involved parents. It must be irresistably tempting to them to think that they can upgrade a school like Hope-Hill, for example, without having to do any hard work, but just by fiat.
Then they can observe the resulting success, success they had no real hand in creating and which may in fact be illusory (because while current Hope-Hill kids would benefit, how much would it hurt the high-achieving kids who were formerly at SPARK or Lin? How do you measure that?) and then trumpet their own expertise. In other words, THEY CAN PRECISELY FOLLOW THE BEVERLY HALL TEMPLATE.
Why did many Americans support bailouts of firms like GM? Because we understood that those companies (and indeed the whole economy) had been victimized by a relatively small number of unethical, vicious, greedy people.
How is this situation not EXACTLY like that one?
APS is soon going to say to us, unless you have some other idea about how to find 65 million dollars, we are going to have to get those buses warmed up.
At that point, it might behoove us to have something more to say than "no."
So, how about: "Then I guess we'd better all get busy looking for some money."
