[floatrock]

What's the right balance on perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good here?

On the one hand, centralization makes a potentially low-interest or high-expense experience more viable. On the other hand, equity.

When is it appropriate to trade some equity for an experience that would otherwise be unfeasible in a every-school-does-it-themselves cause everyone's budget cutting?

[giraffe_lady]

I really don't think this is the actual problem here. A town with multiple high schools is too big for a single central youth woodworking shop.

A town with multiple underfunded schools is not going to have the resources to provide this anyway, or if they do it's because of specific values & policies that are incompatible with providing universal services to citizens.

But once you have decided to do this, and come up with some funding for it somehow: should you use the currently existing infrastructure in place to move children around, and the adults in place with experience working with them, and the bureaucratic apparatus in place to manage them etc etc or should you just build a completely new thing that will totally be better.

Every non-programmer sees the obvious answer immediately. There's no tradeoff here really, these classes belong in middle and high school.

The only reasonable alternative is libraries but they have the same funding issues. The problem is the choice we have made to underfund these institutions. If you're working within these constraints without being able to change the funding, public schools have the most of the apparatus in place already, compared to the alternatives.

[makeitdouble]

> A town with multiple high schools is too big for a single central youth woodworking shop.

I didn't think you wanted every single school kids to do woodworking. Woodworking is great, but what about potery ? What about gardening ? Film photography ? Robotics ?

It makes a lot more sense to me to have an independent entity offering curriculum that residents can express demand for and choose from, than a single activity every school maintains and pushes kids through to make up for the investment. In particular this means that you're not bound to specific age ranges and the same facilities can be used by adult beginners in late night spots for instance.

[giraffe_lady]

This is my first entry in this conversation, I'm not sure what the original commenter had in mind.

But I had just picked woodworking for an example but no. I want them to also have access to welding, sewing, cooking, gardening etc. Some of these can be offered very cheaply, some can't.

I still don't think it would usually make sense for them all to be centralized somewhere other than a school. In places with multiple schools, they may not all have every resource available, and students may have to be shifted around to get them to the tools and educators they need.

But this is already the case in a lot of the US! and esp at the high school level not every school has every program when talking about things like marching band, robotics, individual sports, rotc.

I actually teach an after school programming class at the local high school, interested students are bussed over from several other schools in the district immediately after the last class. There is a whole subfleet of buses to shift kids around so they end up at the correct other school for baseball practice or python class or whatever. So this is already a live problem with working solutions in some districts.

> independent entity offering curriculum that residents can express demand for and choose from

Kind of like a community college? That seems to be the most similar existing institution to what we're talking about. Or should high schools just work more like community colleges?

IDK. Again though I think the solution is just to adequately fund the education system we have rather than try to make a new, side-by-side, intentionally incomplete one. If there's no additional funding coming, then that won't work either and public schools are still the entity that is closest to being able to meet this need with the least additional resources.

[makeitdouble]

I think the fundamental issue could be that these cities require kids to be bussed around, which is an issue I wouldn't know how to solve.

If that could be solved, kids moving from school to their crafting courses isn't much an issue. On the management part, you need a dedicated teachers either way, they can be paid by the school or paid by the town, that doesn't make much difference for them (except perhaps a lower level of certification between a full blown school teacher and someone with a limited teaching license)

On the curriculum, if there is some certification given at the end of the courses I see how being part of a school helps, but if it's targeted at learning and/or enjoying the craft it's less impacting (in particular for things like cooking, gardening. etc)

This is the model most European cities take as far as I know.