The world's most expensive parking lot

Is it true that there aren’t enough kids in the densely populated central part of Iowa City to fill the seats at Hoover Elementary?  No, it’s not.  That’s one reason the school board’s facilities plan would add 330 seats of capacity at two nearby schools, Longfellow and Mann, at a cost of about fifteen million dollars.  Tearing down capacity just to rebuild it less than a mile away is a pretty extravagant way to use fifteen million dollars.

To get a sense of the weakness of the argument that there aren’t enough kids to fill Hoover – even though last year it held almost 400 kids, needed only one gen-ed school bus, and had two temporaries – read this post.

To annex the approximately five-acre Hoover property to City High – probably for a parking  lot – the district is spending fifteen million dollars to rebuild that capacity elsewhere.  Even taking into account the money it can save by not upgrading Hoover, that’s an extraordinarily high price to pay – orders of magnitude more than the market value of undeveloped land.  To read my full post on that topic, click here.

Three school board candidates are on board for closing Hoover: Karla Cook, Brian Kirschling, and Jason Lewis.  If they can accept – and repeat – the kind of reasoning that led to this plan, are they capable of questioning and pushing back against the administration and the rest of the board on other issues?  If they’re willing to close a school with no stated plan for the use of the land, at a huge expense, and in the face of two-to-one public opposition, what else are they capable of doing?

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