Good questions arise from school closing
In her Sunday story on the closing of Falling Water Elementary School, TFP reporter Kendi Anderson is to be commended for correctly identifying what is perhaps, after the home environment, the most vital element in a child’s successful educational experience: “the relationships that exist within the schoolhouse.”
Those relationships include, but are not limited to, children and their families being known by all the teachers in a school; teachers and administrators knowing and trusting each other across many years, and families and other community members knowing and trusting all those involved in the operation of the school.
Implicit in all of this is the requirement that the size of a school be relatively small.
And yet this school joins a list of now-closed neighborhood schools in favor of mega-schools with enrollments of 1,000-plus students, all in the name of cost efficiency.