Small Schools

My daughter's school used to be a program that shared a public school building with another program and a middle school. In the mess of the transition from the Board of Education to the Department of Education over the past year no one even seemed to know what was going on once you went above the level of the program heads, but now the legal fiction of the "school" as building has been eliminated in favor of both programs having the status as small schools with their own PS number and the middle school being phased out. It's a good thing. I think. Both schools will be small enough to function in much of the way that progressive educators believe is the best way for schools to be organized. They will each be schools of choice as well.

The problem is now there is some rather silly bickering over things like schedules, the sharing of the yards, the use of the school busses and all that nonsense. What kind of message do kids get if the adults can't share? Why can't my kid be on the same bus as a kid from the "other" school? Hope that everyone gets together and solves this before the Fall.