Agenda - 03-28-2001-4 - Laserfiche WebLink

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