Before Scottsdale closes another school
OPINION — As students across SUSD prepare to begin the school year, hundreds will walk into unfamiliar buildings, meet new teachers, learn new routines and try to find their place in new schools. Many are still grieving the loss of schools that anchored their families and neighborhoods for decades.
Yet while these students are asked to adapt, adults continue debating the next round of school closures. Here's a toast to Echo Canyon School and Pima Elementary. May their names, their achievements and the communities they served forever remain part of Scottsdale's history.
A neighborhood school is more than a building. It is where teachers know younger siblings because they taught older ones. It is where families return for concerts, games and celebrations. It is where relationships are built, sustained and passed from one generation to the next.
Schools are easy to measure on paper. They're much harder to measure in people's lives. The relationships built over years among students, families, teachers and neighbors don't show up on spreadsheets, but they're often what people miss most when a school is gone. Trust doesn't move with the students. It must be rebuilt.
Many of us know what it's like to lose the person who quietly held a family together. When they pass away, the family does not disappear. Everyone is still there. But something fundamental changes. Many neighborhood schools quietly serve that same role within their communities. School boards are right to consider dollars and cents. Communities should ask them to consider common sense. Budgets and enrollment numbers matter. But so do the long-standing relationships and institutions that quietly hold neighborhoods together.
As a new school year begins, let's welcome students, families and teachers with patience and kindness. We rarely know everything they have experienced or lost along the way.
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