Orange County NC Website
BETTER MODELS FOR PUBLIC POLICY <br />A few states have taken steps to avoid the problems discussed earlier and to make <br />it easier for communities to preserve historic neighborhood schools. <br />Acreage Standards <br />If, as U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley has argued, "size matters" in the <br />creation of supportive learrvxig environments, both size and Zocatian matter when it <br />comes. to creating community-centered schools. If a school's huge size and auto- <br />orientation dictate anedge-of--town location, the school is more likely to be surrounded <br />by a large parking lot than by ahuman-scaled neighborhood. <br />As noted earlier, a handitil of states -New York, 'Washington, Florida, and New <br />_ Hampshire -- recommend smaller sites for schools than those recommended by the <br />Council of Educational Facility Planners International. <br />Maryland and Oregon impose no acreage requirements at all. Maryland's <br />decision to abandon acreage requirements dates to the 1970s, when the state recognized <br />that the application of such standards would force older cities like Baltimore to close <br />almost all their schools. Although the state could have waived the standards for <br />Baltimore and still applied them to smaller communities, state officials decided it did not <br />make sense to have two sets of standards: one for big cities, another for small and mid- <br />sized cities. <br />In recent years, Maryland has earned a national reputation for its Smart Growth <br />Program. The philosophy behind this program, in the words of Governor Parris N. <br />Glendening, is that "we should not use taxpayer money to promote sprawl... Instead, we <br />should use our tax dollars to revitalize existing communities."30 <br />Even before Maryland enacted smart growth legislation in 1997, the state's Public <br />School Construction Program was already promoting smart growth principles. Consider, <br />for example, Maryland's criteria for evaluating local applications for state financial <br />assistance: <br />• "Projects should not encourage `sprawl' development." <br />41 <br />