Policy Changes Eclipsing Common Sense

Hello readers, and happy post-spring break week. I hope you got some time to actually take a break, whether or not you stayed in town. And I hope you were able to take a few moments to see the eclipse! My family went up to Camp Lazarus in Delaware County with the Cub Scouts, and got to experience about three awesome minutes of totality (using our CCS-provided eclipse glasses, of course!).

It’s fitting that this week’s once-in-a-lifetime event converged with two other unique moments in Columbus policy history: an update to the city’s zoning code, and a task force making recommendations for school closure plans. Because policy changes in both of these areas have stagnated so long— the zoning code was last updated in the 1950s, and 10 years have passed since the last round of school consolidations— the convergence feels troubling. Why? Because despite many articles coming out on both topics, I haven’t seen anything about how one will impact the other. In other words, we’re missing the planning aspect of city planning: it’s the Columbus Way wandering wayward.

For those of you who didn’t spend spring break consuming local policy articles (a respectable decision!) let’s back up and talk about what’s going on here. 

🏫 School Closure Plans

Earlier this spring, CCS put together a task force  to advise on closing and consolidating schools. The district says closures are needed due to declining enrollment: in the early 1970s, over 110,000 students attended district schools, a number that has declined in recent years to roughly 45,000.

Maintaining facilities and employing teachers and administrators in underutilized buildings costs money; limiting these expenses is one of the top reasons that the district says it wants to close schools. The problem is that the district has gone through this research and recommendation process twice in the past decade only to decline to implement the recommendations. 

Will this round be different? New Superintendent Angela Chapman says yes. So far, the task force has released a ranking of all the district’s school buildings, including their age and percentage of utilization. Their final recommendations are expected in June. 

🏢 Zoning Code Changes

Meanwhile, just hours after the eclipse, Mayor Ginther’s office officially kicked off its Zone In initiative, a “proposal to modernize the zoning on Columbus corridors.” The plan is predicated on population growth information shared on the Zone In website, namely, that Columbus has had an influx of over 120,000 residents since 2010, and the region expects a population of 3 million by 2050. (There’s a map here if you’d like to peruse the plan, but in short, massive apartment buildings on busy corridors are all the rage.)

So then begs the seemingly obvious question: Aren’t many of the people moving here having children that will eventually need to go to school? And if that’s the case, perhaps we should be factoring this growth in before we start closing schools? Yet on Zone In’s FAQ page, not a single mention is made of schools, students, or families (yes, I searched). 

Meanwhile, the school board’s task force is collecting information about current utilization of buildings; neighborhood growth projections are not part of the data being shared. Population growth doesn't appear much in the issued-but-never-implemented 2018 recommendations on school closures either, though they do mention “residential trends” as a consideration.

To recap: The city is growing at a pace that the mayor’s office says requires our region to “double the number of new units built each year.” At the same time, the school board is developing plans to close schools that are currently underutilized, without appearing to factor in these growth projections. I will note that one of the school district’s task force members works for the city as the Executive Director for the Office of Education, so there may be more coordination behind the scenes than we are seeing publicly. But that in and of itself is a problem: these are major decisions that will affect Columbus residents for decades to come. The public needs confidence, transparency, and input throughout the process—and it’s going to take a lot more than a few new websites to build that up.

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