I wonder if School Board members are aware that Culver Park High School was on the El Marino Language School campus long before the Immersion program moved there from El Rincon, in the early 1990s. So, in fact, one could just as easily argue that the Immersion program is infringing on Culver Park, and not the other way, as it is being portrayed.
Force Conflict of Interests
It’s not the Culver Park students’ fault that the School District has planned its move away from El Marino so poorly. Still, it is not as if the District didn’t see this conflict of interest coming.
How to Stuff Elementary School Site
The District’s annual enrollment reports show that in 2008 El Marino increased its lottery to fill 132 kindergarten slots. As those larger kindergarten classes matriculated up through the grades, the student population at El Marino swelled to where the immersion program now has over 750 students on a campus originally built as a 500-seat neighborhood elementary school.
Full Day Kindergarten
The District started implementing district-wide full-day kindergarten at the other elementary schools in ‘05-‘06. It has waited almost six years to bring it to El Marino, and now that Language Immersion has added even more students, the District wants to implement full-day K classes. They know full-well that doing so would pit Culver Park students’ interests against those of incoming kindergarten immersion students and parents.
Why Now? Why Culver Park?
The District is not under any state-mandated timeline to make El Marino’s half-day kindergarten into a full-day program. What is the rush to get it done now? Why should Culver Park have to move when it called El Marino its home first? There are other bungalows on the other side of the El Marino campus. Why not moved the Office of Child Development, SACC and KIK?
Low Man on the Totem Pole
The Culver Park family of staff and students housed at the El Marino site probably is beginning to understand how the Native American Indians must have felt when the U.S. government forced them off their ancestral lands and onto inferior reservations.
Moving, but in Whose Best Interests?
Can anyone on this Board publicly say that he or she truly believes that what is being planned for Culver Park is in the best interests of the continuation students? There is no doubt that forcing Culver Park from its present site at El Marino is in the best interest of the 132 incoming immersion students. And it will save their parents on their after-school childcare costs. But,= is it in the best interests of the 60 to 70 continuation students?
A Better Shake
The Culver Park High School students are District students, too. They are under the auspices of the Board. Therefore they should receive far better consideration than what has been hastily proposed.
New Campus Large Enough?
In closing, if the Board still believes that its primary responsibility is to do what is best for every District student, I suggest that it reconsider this ill-advised, forced march of Culver Park High School to the back of the Farragut Elementary parking lot. Wait until a more suitable, and permanent, home can be found.
Mr. Laase may be contacted at GMLaase@aol.com
