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I'm a little mystified and dismayed by the performance of OSD on this issue.

Several years ago, when a new development (Trillium) was planned for the land that is now LBA Woods Park, OSD told the city that there was not enough room in McKenney, and the kids from Trillium would have to be bussed to Garfield. A few years later, there is talk of closing McKenney.

Then, last year OSD begged the City of Olympia to share the Yelm Highway park site (strawberry fields in the interim) for a new secondary school, one that would take 5-10 years to build. Now they are talking of closing two elementary schools --- which tells anyone who can do arithmetic that in 5-10 years they will have FEWER, not MORE high school students.

Early in this process, there was talk of closing Boston Harbor Elementary. I did not grieve about that too much, because almost every one of those students was already being bussed somewhere, and changing the destination of a bus does not seem like such a big deal. But both Madison and McKenney have surrounding populations where kids can walk (as I did through 6th grade) or bike (as I did starting in 7th grade) to school. That's a bigger deal to me.

It's been known for decades that the fertility rate has been declining. China had an actual decline in population last year. Japan has been shrinking. This is good. The planet really cannot handle billions more of us. But, for demographers and school facility planners, this is just data, and one needs to use that data to make rational decisions. Those rational decisions can include making a portion of schools available for other uses, or closing some entirely. But we don't yet know if this was a failure of the elected school board, their selected Superintendent, or lower level capital facilities planners within the OSD staff. We do know that the declining student population was predictable.

In my opinion, OSD needs to name the people responsible for flawed analysis, and those people need to be replaced if they have not been. This is a failure of management and a failure of analysis. The public has a right to know whose mistakes these were, and be assured that the human resource problems that led to this have been addressed. To date the Olympia School Board has not come to grips with the underlying failed analysis.