School Location Madness

So far, we couldn't be more pleased with our decision to move. My son's new school is excellent in every regard, and he is much happier.

But I do have one complaint. What idiot on the planning board thought this would be a good location to build an elementary-to-high-school campus? The Google picture isn't up to date, so you can see how it looked before construction began several years ago. The school is miles from even the closest subdivision. No child walks or rides their bikes to these schools. Every student has to arrive and depart via some sort of motorized vehicle.

Why would they do that? It's insane. Yet they did the same thing here - buidling a school in the middle of field, miles from everything.

Why not build the school here instead? Look, some kids could actually walk or ride their bikes to a school built here, yet there is plenty of open space in which to build and expand.

Or take a look at some older schools in the same district. Within this area, there are currently two elementary schools, one middle school, and one new high school (again, an old picture, but trust me, they're there). These schools were built to serve the community, thus they are located within the community - not a remote cotton field. What a novel idea - make the school a part of the community to engage the community, rather than the rabbits and owls.

In the future, would it be possible to build our new schools closer to the students who will attend them? And how about we build more schools and smaller schools, rather than giant mega schools of thousands of students and six or eight classes of every grade? I know, sounds crazy, but it's just crazy enough to work.