Portable education

Stop, Drop and Roll has been covering the phenemenon which is the Kindergarten Round-up process for Edison Elementary School on the East End.   And tonight, School District staff will be making a recommendation to the School Board regarding a change in the enrollment policies in the case that there are more students than slots, which will probably be the case for Edison.   I imagine that this will be a well-attended meeting.  On SDR, Board Member David Forbes helped clarify some of the issues lingering for some Edison parents:

…This issue has nothing to do either with non Alameda residents, or indeed, insofar as this seems to be an Edison discussion, anyone from outside the Edison attendance zone.

First, the District currently has a first come-first served policy if there are too many kids in a given year for a given school. After the overnight camping earlier this Spring at Edison, staff has proposed that if there are too many kids FROM WITHIN THE ATTENDANCE ZONE, priority be assigned by lottery instead of the current first come-first served policy.

Secondly, to answer the question posed in 12 &13 “Is it true that non-residents of Alameda can attend Alameda schools?” - Yes it is true. It is State law that children of people working within a District may be enrolled in that District. These students are, however, far enough down on the list of priorities that this issue is totally irrelevant to the discussion.

And of course, there are the letters, or in this case, the emails to the board members regarding this topic.   But if you all have an opinion on this subject, there is already a pretty good comment thread going on at SDR, what I wanted to propose is that if the school district will be looking in to expanding classrooms in order to make room for more Kindergarten classes and need to add portables, might I suggest that a more attractive modular classroom be considered rather than the rather standard portable that graces all other school campuses.   From Project Frog (a Bay Area based company) they are offering environmentally conscious (and much better looking) portable classrooms.  From their website:

More than 5 Million students squeeze into “not so temporary” trailers
The research also showed that, while modular trailers do indeed satisfy temporary needs for additional classroom space, they often end up remaining on campus and in-use for much longer, often indefinite, periods of time. In fact, 76.5% of school planners who intend to use trailer classrooms for the short-term, end up using them longer than expected (on average 6-8 years).

Poor classroom design leads to sub-optimal productivity
During its research, MKThink found that the vast majority of available structures consist primarily of simple and unattractive rectangular trailer modules that were never engineered to be educational environments. They are characterized by poor natural and artificial light, low ceilings, sub-optimal air quality, mold problems, weak student-teacher sight lines, and limited high-tech capabilities. These structures generally have poor aesthetics - with colors and interior designs that are both uninspired and uninspiring - and with little connection to the general look and feel of the rest of the institution’s campus. Not surprisingly, MKThink found that teachers and students, alike, view trailer classrooms unfavorably. For example, when given the choice, more than 60% of teachers surveyed explicitly avoid teaching in trailers. More importantly, the research indicated a correlation between the physical classroom facility and teacher/student productivity.

Project FROG™: Affordable high performance environments engineered for learning
Based on this fundamental research, we concluded that a stylish building, flooded with natural light, high ceilings, clear sight lines, with easy access to the latest high-tech teaching tools, can foster creativity, encourage better student-teacher collaboration, and ultimately inspire academic achievement.

I know when I was in middle and high school, we loathed any class that was held in “The Portables,” maybe if we had portables as nice as these, we all would be clamoring to classes up in the portables.   And provide the additional space to get kids whose parents have “paid a premium” on their homes to get them into their neighborhood school.  But just between you and me, there is something about that phrase that makes me a little uncomfortable down in the pit of my stomach in the context of elementary education.