On May 18, voters in the Arlington School District will vote on a school budget that requires a tax levy rise of 8.29 percent. Even if the budget passes, there will be cuts to teaching positions and educational programs. If the budget fails, the District Superintendent has proposed closing Arthur S. May Elementary School on Raymond Avenue in order to balance the budget.
Arthur S. May is the most racially and economically diverse school in the Arlington Central School District, while also being one of the most academically successful schools in the district. In its 85 years it has managed to perfect the art of providing an excellent education to this diverse population—something that many magnet schools strive to do with limited success.
It has achieved this because it has developed a culture that supports and provides for the needs of every child. Closing Arthur S. May, which was ranked 280th out of 2283 elementary schools in New York in the 2008-2009 3rd-4th grade state test, would be a travesty. Not only would many underprivileged yet successful children be uprooted from an environment in which they are thriving, they would also be flung into more crowded classrooms, where, as the research demonstrates, they will have a lesser chance of academic success.
Arthur S. May’s location makes it accessible to families who do not own cars. It affords many students the opportunity to walk to school, thereby reducing their carbon-footprint and allowing them access to a healthier lifestyle. Its proximity to Vassar allows its teachers to take walking field-trips, at a time when budget cuts would otherwise make field-trips impossible. It also provides many Vassar students with rich, easily accessible field work opportunities and a chance to gain teaching experience.
Closing Arthur S. May or any other school will adversely and permanently affect the quality of education that is the pride of the Arlington Central School District. The closure of a school will affect an estimated 1,500 elementary students across the district, as students from the closed school are moved into other elementary schools, students from those schools are moved into other schools to make room for them, and so on, in a ripple effect.
I am not opposed to movement or to change, having benefitted from a peripatetic lifestyle myself. However, not all children respond equally comfortably to transition and change, especially in their early years. Children from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, those with less stable family lives and those with special needs are adversely affected by transition. There is a substantive difference between forced migration and willing emigration. Refugees bear scars where travelers accumulate experiences.
Schools are not merely buildings. They are organic communities that evolve over time. They cannot be disassembled, shuffled, and “put back together” with the expectation that they will function as hey did before. Many of the schools in the district, like Arthur S. May, have a “magic” or “chemistry” that cannot be reduced to a formula and reproduced at will.
Closing a school will at best provide a one-time relief from ongoing year-over-year tax increases. It will not address or solve the more fundamental issues that beset the Arlington Central School District and that make the rate of growth of the school budget unsustainable; and it will not avert the future crises that this growth rate makes inevitable. We must demand that our elected representatives at the local and state level address these long-term challenges.
Right now, however, our backs are to the wall. The most important thing we can do is to come together as a community to save our schools and programs, by voting to pass the school budget on May 18th. Vote, if you can. Vote yes, if you would.
—Lisa R. Kaul is a parent of a first-grader at Arthur S. May Elementary School.
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