Updated: 26 a few seconds ago Published: 28 a few seconds ago

On Halloween, I walked the streets around Tudor Elementary School, rejoicing in the growing community of young families we have noticed in the four years since we arrived here. The neighborhood was full of children who engaged in trick-or-treating activities in this area because their parents liked the location of the 1967 school in its heart. It’s not a neighborhood with prestige, pretty houses, or views, but it’s a place where you can trust your second grader will walk to school, where you’ll meet their friends and other parents on the playground at the end of the day. It is the main feature of this district and a geographically isolated school. It is the only one in the mixed residential areas bounded by Tudor, Dowling and Elmore roads, as well as the Seward Highway, and the nearest elementary school is unusually far away, a mile and a half away.

When Tudor was proposed to close the next day, I said to myself, “Well, the population is going down and hard things are going to happen, but I don’t have any good reason why it shouldn’t happen to us.” » I knew that the Anchorage school district had conducted surveys and analyzed a matrix of school statistics to inform its decisions. Still, I had my share of questions: Why was Tudor closing before schools with lower populations and usage? Why is Inlet View getting a whole new building for 100 fewer kids? Does their statistical snapshot reflect all the parents walking these streets with strollers and small children? Would a mini-census show the next wave of growth? Tudor is buried deep in slow neighborhood streets – do they want their schools to be easier to get to when it snows?

On Monday, we learned that the district plans to turn the Tudor building into the new home for the K-12 Whaley School — a special program not available to neighborhood children. On Wednesday, a school board member attended our Tudor PTA meeting and pointed out that Tudor is not even in the bottom half of the 45 schools evaluated in ASD’s analytical matrix, leading me to conclude that although some schools are closed based on the matrix, Tudor is sacrificed to solve Whaley’s problems.

Whaley’s current building is objectively terrible, and Tudor, in turn, is among the least renovated schools in the neighborhood. Naturally, ASD sees synergy in aligning Tudor’s deferred maintenance costs with the creation of a new Whaley — a smart fiscal move and one that also avoids the logistical hurdles that make revamping the current Whaley building very difficult. When I was in fifth grade at Taku Elementary School, ASD moved my class to another building for the year while they were renovated, but no temporary building can provide the specialized spaces and features built to accommodate to the behavioral challenges of Whaley students. For example, ASD was just forced to modify the current Whaley Building with new soundproof quiet rooms, pursuant to a 2023 Federal Court mandate requiring ASD to abandon its “seclusion” practices in favor of other de-escalation techniques designed to address behaviors. episodes. It is not possible for ASD to replicate such functionality in a temporary building.

Among Whaley’s wide range of students are many troubled children, adolescents, and even legal adults whose difficulties have necessitated their removal from the general student population. The difficult, unglamorous work that Whaley students and staff do is incredible to me. Given the difficulty of their conditions, they frankly deserve the best facilities in this neighborhood. Creating a new and improved Whaley is clearly a worthy endeavor, but people familiar with the school know that Whaley poses real and visible safety problems. Tax strategy aside, no one would propose locating it in the middle of a residential neighborhood, sharing a fence with 27 residential yards, surrounded by people who have organized their lives and investments to be in close proximity to an elementary school .

While all affected neighborhoods will lose a valuable asset, Tudor is the only school proposed to be replaced by a program that cannot directly serve the children around it and which, rightly or not, will always be considered a liability . The appeal and functioning of our neighborhood will be radically altered as our children are bused to a distant school, crossing paths with another group of students arriving by bus from across the city. This constitutes a downgrading of the neighborhood well beyond other neighborhoods facing closure or replacement by a charter school. For these reasons, I urge ASD to reverse its proposed Whaley decision in favor of a broader evaluation of the best location for this program and in pursuit of a more equitable distribution of the impacts of its right-sizing efforts.

Miles Garrod is a lifelong Anchorage resident and architect who lives near Tudor Elementary School.

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