Patrick joined the private Facebook group “Bring Integrity Back to Alexandria” at the request of several members after announcing his candidacy for Alexandria City Council. Since joining he has responded to policy questions from the group organizer and others.
Question of the Week: Would you support any sort of housing on school grounds currently or in the future? Yes or no.
As it stands currently for ACPS, No. Our focus must be to address our capacity issues, education methodology, and curriculum as first steps to delivering a world-class education to our students—ensuring that an Alexandria education prepares EVERY STUDENT to thrive financially and in any other means they desire. Modular building technology, like Virginia Tech’s Futurehaus could enable fast and environmentally responsible expansion of our classrooms.
We must also ensure we continue to leverage technology, implement project-based learning, create work-study programs, develop skills training, and match internships. This ought to be where our focus is, starting with developmental day-care and following post-secondary job placements. I look forward to the opportunity to work with the School Board to make this happen.But, for the sake of integrity, honesty, and transparency, I’ll share more.
I believe housing on school grounds is already in practice at some of Alexandria’s private schools. I’m not fully up to speed on specifics, but barring complaints, I don’t see any reason to oppose it if their respective administrations feel that it is in the best interest of their institution.I’d also like to make it clear that in the future, since your question speaks to unconditional hypotheticals, if I was presented a proposal for teacher housing on ACPS grounds at a large site that did not restrict future use or expansion of the school, I’d consider it and judge it on its merits.Certain conditions come to mind: it would have to be separate and clearly distinct, access-controlled, student-restricted apartments available ONLY FOR TEACHERS who understood and agreed to abide by the professional expectations that came with with residing where you work.
Our students would benefit from having more educators living and vested in the community. In general, we don’t pay our teachers enough to live in our beautiful city, and for Alexandria to achieve a world-class school system, we need attract the best teachers.As someone who comes from a family of teachers, I’m very familiar with the late nights and weekends of lesson planning, grading, and picking up supplies, all after a day on your feet corralling a room full of young minds! I will always take a hard look at any option that could make that Herculean effort easier.
It’s my understanding that this topic’s genesis is an idea presented during a brainstorm session, which has since been put to bed. So I’m not sure if there is real consideration here. But if it does come before me, I will look more at case-studies from top schools and universities to see what lessons we could apply. I certainly would not dismiss an option that benefited our educators without considering it first, nor would I expect any other elected council person to do that either.