Teacup Café XXXI

[Willow Oran]

That really is sad, but I thought actually that Willow meant that the schools had no walls because of some educational experiment. Like: "kids shouldn't be in narrow rooms because that disturbs their creativity, so lets not build walls inside the building" sort of nonsense.
(My apologies to people who really believe in that sort of thing for sounding sarcastic)

That is what I meant. Katya's description of run down schools is true, mostly in the states along the Mississippi.

The Seattle schools I was talking about were built in... the 70's, I think, and for some ill thought out reason they chose to build them with as few indoor walls as possible. So there are walls between classrooms for different grade levels, but then each grade level has a 'pod' of three spaces seperated by little more than waist to shoulder high shelves and a shared play area/computer space. Which isn't so bad if the class sizes are small and the students all well behaved.
However, the classes are over enrolled as far down as kindergarten and the public school system here requires that special needs students, including those with sever behavioral disorders, be integrated into the regular classes.
Add that to the fact that the district of the city these schools are in is the most multicultural district in the city and you get 70-90 highly distractable students speaking a variety of languages crammed into these spaces with only 3 underpaid teachers and a shortage of qualified interpreters/IA's and still expected to come out of it able to pass the requirements imposed by the No Child Left Behind Act.
This has recently exacerbated the over enrollment problem because students from failing schools are getting moved to schools with better test scores, despite the fact that the bulk of the resources are being poured into bolstering the failing schools. So the schools with good teachers are ending up overcrowded and underfunded while the schools that haven't met standards get extra funds but have very small class sizes. Seattle teachers did just get a raise, after the teachers in the neighboring school district started off the year with a strike, but the pay still isn't anywhere near what it should be.