HALA and Public Schools
You may recall that when the Mayor's HALA plan for our city came out, the plan consistently referred to schools as "amenities." That's just wrong because no city is great without great schools which are part of the infrastructure of a city. (They also had it in the plan that if the City built housing that could support a school at the street level, that school would go to a charter group. When I challenged that idea, the word "charter" mysteriously disappeared. No one at any HALA meeting will explain how it got in there and why it went away.)
You may have recently received an e-mail about the EIS for the HALA planwith a link for public comments. I have to smile because while I think it important that citizens have access to the entire plan, it's a huge document. I think if you really wanted input, a detailed synopsis would have been helpful. That's if you really wanted public input.
A reader did alert me to a section I had missed in the plan, called Public Services and Utilities (with public schools being part of that). (And thank you to this reader; I depend on readers to send me this kind of information.)
What this reader noted:
In addition to my dismay that the Comprehensive Plan seemingly did not include Crown Hill in its study of schools by sector (not listed on page 4), and omitting Whitman Middle School from the list of schools lacking full sidewalk infrastructure (page 5 and 15), the DEIS does not offer sufficient mitigations on the impact of Seattle Schools Community Forum: HALA and Public Schools: