So I'm kind of pissed at the parents in my neighborhood.
[rant forthcoming]
We moved to a new neighborhood 2 years ago. Great house, nice neighbors, active community. Just overall a good situation except due to the recent history of the area, we aren't zoned for the A+ elementary school located at the only entrance to the neighborhood. Our neighborhood is zoned for a school 15 minutes away while the neighborhood across the road from that school is zoned for the school at the entrance to our neighborhood. As you can imagine, it led to traffic nightmares during drop off and pickup. Sometimes it would take people 30+ minutes to the neighborhood from a mile or so away.
When my wife and I realized the situation, we started working with two women in the neighborhood to petition the school board and the elementary school to include our neighborhood due to our proximity to the school. (The townhouses in our neighborhood are literally a stone's throw away.) We wrote emails, held meetings, and took concerns from our neighbors. The whole process ended with a meeting between residents, school administrators, and school board members in which the school board essentially agreed with our proximity argument and gave our neighborhood priority choice into the school. This meant any available spots in the school would go to our neighborhood. It was a huge victory. Within a week, my son and other kids got word that we would be able to go to the school. Along with that, we were able to get the city to add a right turn lane into the school, so residents wouldn't have to sit in the school lines.
So everything worked out, right?
Of course not.
There were some legitimate issues to address now that there was car and pedestrian traffic coming from both ways into the school. A few parents from our neighborhood did not handle it well. First week of school last year, two dads cursed out the principal and assistant principal during morning drop off. A few other parents made negative comments about the school to teachers basically demanding new services for the neighborhood. Later in the school year, we found out one of the women we were working with had been sending out these scathing emails to the principal as the "official representative" from our neighborhood.
As a result, the school leadership and teachers hate our neighborhood. We found out today that not a single kid from our neighborhood got into the school this year. It's possible there were no spots available, but teachers and administrators regularly tell my wife and I how annoyed they are with our neighborhood. We still have a great relationship with the principal and they were great with our son last year. My wife and the principal get along really well and would probably be close friends in a different situation.
I'm really pissed. My 3 year old son will get into kindergarten there because the district doesn't separate siblings. But our good friends in the neighborhood have triplets starting kindergarten next year and they'll be screwed. Priority choice was supposed to help build cohesion for the neighborhood and we were planning on making a push for rezoning now for next year. We worked hard to set up a good situation for the neighborhood and a few angry parents wrecked it for everybody. Meanwhile, the developers keep building and within a year, we'll probably have double the residents we had two years ago. Most likely, they'll all be forced out of the neighborhood for school.