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Officials talk up school closings

First libraries, now schools. All kinda vague at this point, and very last-resortish of course, and if it whips up anger and organizing among lots of parents - especially parents of elementary-school kids - well, that's just a coincidence, and surely not at all a repeat of last year's dire warnings of 700 layoffs.

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Let's see if I learned my multiplication right:

School officials have estimated that the district has about 4,500 empty classroom seats across all grade levels. Each empty seat costs the district about $4,000, school officials have said.

The BPS is wasting 18 million dollars just keeping empty seats open?

Closing some schools sounds like an obvious move. I just hope that the solution involves closing the schools that have the empty seats (by and large, because people don't want to send their kids to those schools), and not closing the schools that are full up (because parents actually want to send their kids there). I can too easily see a reprise of the argument that bigger schools are more efficient coming out of this.

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And this is why I appeared before the school board at budget hearings in 2006, 2007 and 2009 - I think I had a migraine from looking at the numbers in 2008 - to tell them that they were heading straight for a wall (actually I told them they had hit the wall in 2009).

The ed reform bill will take care of a lot of this - it's too late to open charters for 2011, but you can expect many to open starting in 2012 and beyond. The BPS is about to shrink drastically - I'd guess at least 10-20% before the next mayoral election. You get to 10% just by providing charter seats for the kids that didn't "win" the charter lottery in Boston. Pretty soon we won't be laying off teachers because of a lack of funding - we'll be laying them off for a lack of students.

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If the problem is too many schools, and the solution is closing some, how does opening more schools (charters) help with that?

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Close 5 underperforming city schools, open 3 charters - net is -2 schools. My guess is the charters will be looking to lease some of the closed facilities.

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The kidlet's school is one of the tiny 1930s-era schools that still do a very good job in the West Zone. There are no empty classrooms there - if anything, they've had to carve out space from rooms originally meant for such things as the library to fit all the kids in. And while big schools do offer things these old buildings can't (a gym, for example), there are advantages to small schools as well, such as more of a community and chance for parental involvement.

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