State intervention has turned out to be a financial godsend to “Gotham City School District 100,” even if the school board members lost their jobs and state representatives were sitting in some school staff meetings. The district finally possesses a functional website and computers without floppy drives. But two years ago, the State Superintendent of Education looked at the district’s schools and suggested knocking down the two middle schools and adding an addition onto the high school to house the middle school students. In the Superintendent’s view, fixing up the dilapidated middle-school buildings was a waste of money. A large portion of any extra money the district receives in the near future will probably have to be sunk into infrastructure, into the buildings and grounds that were built in the middle of the last century.
This year, one of the two middle schools will be closed and those students will be placed in the larger middle school, a school where classrooms sometimes are in the nineties. On other days, these classrooms fall into the midfifties.
This fact alone may clobber any attempts to raise scores. Students seldom function well in such extreme conditions. They also whine a lot.
