Schools
LETTER: Shocked But Disappointingly, Not Surprised
A parent attends a Bullis Charter School meeting about the coming school year, and wonders when the school will present its plans for sharing Blach Intermediate School.
Editor:
So, over the last few weeks, I was fortunate to attend to meetings about "How we (LASD & BCS) can successfully share Blach"
- On Weds, May 22nd at Covington, I believe - Doug Smith and Sandra McGonagle did a great job of describing how Blach would be "shared" among LASD and BCS students, even going so far as to alter the Blach starting time to accomodate the addition of the new students from BCS. I left this meeting jazzed that it seemed we could finally find a mutual ground of respect and collaboration upon which we could build as a community.
- On Weds, June 5 at BCS - after a wonderful student concert, Wanny scheduled an introduction of BCS' two new executives (both of whom seemed very nice), along with a discussion of how BCS intended to use Blach.
After the community discussion the prior week, I was anticipating the meeting, and looking forward to hearing how the communities could work together. Unfortunately, what I heard was Wanny doing a great job of isolating the Bullis program, and attempting to describe any possible way that they were better/unique.
Starting with before/after pics of some of the facilities improvements that BCS has made "on their own dime", which I'm only assuming was done to show that they can make lemonade from lemons, but to me seemed to me to be the same things that all schools are doing through PTA contributions.
The only discussion of Blach usage was about a new FabLab program (very interesting concept, but certainly not collaborative), and didn't touch at all upon which students would be a Blach, when, how it will be decided, etc. I'm not sure if I missed something between the lines, but I left there assuming that there must be some other meeting where they will actually discuss the details, because otherwise they have nothing but marketing fluff (I don't mean this as an insult to marketing people, but as an ex engineer, this is how I felt when attending shows where it appeared that there was more style than substance).
— Tom Fenstermacher
The writer is a parent in the Los Altos School District
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