Facility Alternatives and a Decision Matrix

The RAS School Board continues to wrestle with which schools to close. In fact, they have chosen to muddy the waters some by opening the discussion as to whether Sonnesyn or Sunny Hollow would be the better Spanish Immersion site.

My advice is that the Board should complete a Decision Matrix that includes all 5 of the alternatives that were created and assessed. Then this should be made public once the decision has been made. The advantage would be that the citizens could then see the criteria, weightings and scores that drove the decision. Which would reduce the sense of politics, closed door negotiations, favoritism, etc that seems to be proliferating in the blogs...

I use decision matrices often at work to bring teams together and to ensure a decision is made by consensus. Also, it helps management to understand why the team made a decision that was not intuitively obvious.

As a side note, a couple things I am still curious about:
- How do we fund the update on Northport and Lakeview?
- What is the plan for ESC and bus garage during next 5 years?
- Are we keeping the NE schools to encourage open enrollment from Brooklyn Center and Mpls? (ie funds)
- Will we lose more in the SW than we gain in the NE ? (ie active volunteers, funding, etc)
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