School Redistricting Issues facing our school system

By Chao Wu

Unfortunately I could not speak at the public forum due to a time conflict. Here is my written testimony.

2017-11-07

My name is Chao Wu, a candidate running for the 2018 school board. Thanks for the board taking  extraordinary time and discussion on the very important issues we are facing now. I would like to share my thoughts:

1)     Allow walkers be walkers to keep communities together and to minimize the extra transportation time and resources. There are many guidelines in the Policy 6010 to keep contiguous community together.  Walkers are a key and stable part of the community. We hope the board and the superintendent will keep this principle in mind while we find ways to alleviate overcrowding.

 2)     Have a back-up plan and prepare for redistricting to alleviate the overcrowded schools if the superintendent’s JumpStart could not enroll enough students.

 3)     Accelerate the construction of high school #13 and new elementary schools that are much overdue. There is an immediate need for the new high schools and elementary schools. I hope the board can keep working with the county council, county executive, and state government and allow the construction to start as soon as possible.

 4)     Don’t forget the effort on pursuing a more scientific school start time that affects all the County’s children. There are much research indicating the advantages of starting school later.  Some of our high school children have to get up as early as 5:30 AM to board the school bus which is clearly not healthy for our school age children. Last year’s proposals were not able to correct the high school student school time problems without creating new problems. We hope the board and superintendent will not forget this important priority that affects all our children.

 I believe we are a student focused education system. We can do better. We need to find a common sense solution and seek common ground for the benefit of all our students.