Still waiting to hear key results from the facilities meeting . . .

Last Wednesday night, several hundred people attended the school district’s “community workshop” on facilities planning.  As I described here, the district asked participants to do two “work activities” to assess the different proposed scenarios for a long-term facilities plan.  Why are we still waiting to hear the results of the activity that directly asked people their preferences?

The first activity asked people to rate the scenarios on five criteria, all chosen by the district.  Some people, including me, bristled at that activity, because it assumed that we all agreed about what the criteria should be, and that we all agreed that each of those criteria should be weighted equally.  Moreover, it seemed as if the criteria had been set up in such a way as to favor closing older, established elementary schools and building new, bigger ones.  “Neighborhood schools,” for example, was weighted just one-fifth of the total, even though the consultants reported that people at previous sessions had put a high priority on preserving older schools.

The second work session, though, made more sense: it directly asked people which scenarios they preferred at the elementary, junior high, and high school levels.  The results of this session, then, would be a much better gauge of which scenarios the crowd actually wanted.

By the end of the meeting, the district had totaled up the results of the first work session – by simply adding the numbers for each of the criteria together, weighting them equally.  Scenario 1, which would close no schools, got the highest total, but Scenario 4, which would close three schools, came in second.

These were the “results” that were reported in the media the next day.  One newspaper, for example, reported that Scenarios 1 and 4 “appear to be the most popular” and that, while Scenario 1 had “relatively strong support,” Scenario 4 was “another crowd favorite.”  The Patch reported that “the crowd seemed mostly split.”  The district’s facilities director commented that the Facilities Planning Steering Committee might have to find “some middle ground” between Scenarios 1 and 4.  “I can’t wait to see the results of activity two for that reason,” he said.

Yet wait we did – and we’re still waiting.  Although the results of the first work session were released in just thirty minutes, four days have now gone by and we still haven’t heard the results of the second work session.  (The district hasn’t yet responded to my email inquiring about the issue.)

Many participants at the meeting came away with the impression that Scenario 1 was the overwhelming favorite of the crowd – a very different impression than the one left by the first work session and media reports.  But until we see the results, we can’t know.

Some people have speculated that the district is intentionally structuring the process to favor closing older schools.  I can’t know what the intentions of district officials are, but I do know that, if I were them, I would go out of my way to avoid giving the impression of putting a finger on the scale.  So why is it taking them so long to let us know what people’s actual preferences were?

Chris Liebig blogs about local and national school issues at A Blog About School.  You can also follow him on Twitter.