I’m old and I still get surprise by how USA is addicted to cars.
you ever tried to get around USA?
That’s my point. You build everything around cars like of there wasn’t anything else. I’m Canadian and we’re not muxh better, but you wouldn’t see a school like that here, and I didn’t need a car until my 30s.
Isn’t 90% of Canada’s population within 100 miles of the southern border or something? I’m not trying to make excuses for the US but it is a very large area to cover. We actually used to have much better passenger rail coverage than we do now so we’ve actively been making things worse :(
Yes, and it’s ridiculous. American car culture is a mental illness.
Yes, Some places are halfway decent to get around, even smaller places, but usually only either in the east or maybe on the West Coast and then generally historic neighbourhoods as building new places that are not utterly hostile to humans is generally illegal nowadays in most places.
If you are going to treat children like this, just don’t have them.
You’re blaming the parents for a nation that has built its pride on paving over paradise?
Initial D vibes intensify
Multi track learning!
The building looks like a shithole because it was created in the 50s for children’s use. They designed it to be indestructible.
1956, 31,827sqft, constructed as the Dayton Boys (& Girls) Club featuring a gym and indoor swimming pool. Famously spared from demolition when the U.S. 35 highway interchange was routed around it.
Moved to New Choices Community School, grades 7- 12, in 2000.
Property sold in 2006 for almost half a million
Dayton SMART Elementary School is established in the building, serving grades K–6.
Thanks. I had done half the research and ended up in the opposite resolution.
So yeah, a new-ish free charter school using an existing older building. The older building had the freeway built around it but for some reason hadn’t been demolished
I wonder if this is actually a genius trick to deter mass shootings? Someone should check if the number of shootings at this location is below the national average.
The cafeteria in question
Prison vibes
Holy cow you can hear the fluorescents buzzing just looking at it.
I really often wonder if school architects and prison architects are the same people. Both are cruel, deliberate, human containment pens made of concrete and steel.
My town just got through a couple decades of replacing all its schools but the old buildings are still around as community centers. The new ones are much less prison like than the old ones.
Maybe a lot of it is how long we keep most school buildings
It’s because we built a lot of the prisons at the same time we built a lot of the schools. They’re both usually intended to serve multiple generations, and while the usage requirements may grow they don’t grow so fast that you need to tear them down entirely and rebuild, usually just renovate.
They’re also usually designed with more functional requirements to makes certain parts of them mandatory.
For example, schools often must have a certain amount of windowless hallway where the walls are a prescribed strength for tornado safety. Needs to be within a certain range of each classroom, have a limited amount of potential debris, and so on. As a result, every school ends up with at least one “hub” hallway that’s fucking bleak as hell, because the storm shelter requirements also make it a very obvious hub to build classrooms off, and if you need to add more capacity: make the hall longer.I’ve seen some designs where newer schools are being built with the shelter but as a + in the middle, with a windowed hallway around the outside, or even just taking the same floor plan and bending it to give classrooms larger window surfaces.
First thing I thought of. No thanks. Poor kids.
Yes. Architects who design schools also design prisons. And the designs have a lot of similarity.
In the US the school districts are primarily for containment, then for indoctrination, then for edification.
Note that this changed momentarily after Sputnik and America decided it needed to get into gear. And the current Republican push to dismantle public education systems entirely are reactionary to that, since a lot of that generation dared to question authority.
I really often wonder if school architects and prison architects are the same people
Jester Dorms on the UTexas Austin campus were famously built by the state’s biggest prison contractor, by the same name.
Looks like a set from Squid Games
Damn. Imagine going to school in two backroom levels at once.
That actually looks shockingly like my elementary schools cafeteria, which was in the basement level and everything. (Although the rest of my school was fine and not enveloped by some hellish highway on ramp)
Public education disparity in America is crazy. I had a good upbringing, I was an only child and both my parents had full time jobs. The only time I can really remember feeling jealous about seeing something someone else had an opportunity as when they were a kid was when I went to a performance at Milton High School. It’s a public highschool in Georgia and genuinely looked nicer than the college I went to. While I was in highschool, we had more trailers* outside than classrooms inside.
And I know that with a global perspective I still did have a very privileged education, but like the OP says, when we’re talking about what “the richest country on earth” is doing, it just doesn’t add up. It’s not like I wasn’t aware my highschool was shitty, even while I was there I knew it was, because we’d go to other ones for various events. But even the nicest ones I saw, that one still felt an order of magnitude nicer. A lot of it had to do with the performance. The school had some sort of partnership with Cirque de Solel (no idea how to spell it, and also I may have misunderstood and it wasn’t actually a partnership and just a play that they originally made). Seeing a fully packed, massive auditorium for a highschool performance that also involved acrobatics was just crazy. The arts are always underfunded, so I can only imagine how nice everything else was at this school. It’s basically in the wealthiest area of my state.
*: People outside the US or certain parts of the US might not know what this refers to. It’s like a mobile classroom (compared to a permanent structure, lol, same way a “mobile home” is “mobile”). These were used because the population growth in the area outpaced school constitution. So instead of building a new school which takes long, just throw trailers at the problem. But my highschool genuinely did have more trailers outside than rooms inside.
And just to reiterate, this was a public highschool. We should be investing more in our future by investing in education, both college and k12.
The staff can’t even manage a fucking star wars quote
May the force will be with you? CTFO
That appears to be something they purchased to hang up, likely the cheapest one they could find, which was a knock off from temu
It looks like they combined it with
The Force will be with you. Always.
The A is centered and there’s no room for always, so if you’re saying they mixed it up, that’s a pretty bad mix up.
tar wars
They have a virtual tour of the inside of the building, if you’d like to get really depressed.
I have seen better fallout shelters, yikes.
“NBA ALL STARS” “Never been absent”
So like kids that come to school sick and shit, or had a death in the family.
I hated awards and prizes for this crap. In my high school the best attendance got the first pick of assigned parking spots.
Excused absences don’t count toward this award. At least not in any of the schools my daughters have attended.
The administration grades the schools on attendance.
Our school does not count excused absences against you. obviously their/your MMV
Technically, it’s still a fucked up metric, but if they don’t curb it at the school level, it’s a lot harder to do it at the state/parent level.
Parents have a pretty strong incentive to keep kids home rather than pay for daycare/neighbors/family to help. They’re using the kids to wage the war.
“hello sunshine” on a square meter of plastic grass carpet in a class in a basement without windows
First floor feels like an asylum. Second is alright.
You’ll never guess the skin color of the kids we put in there.
So, apparently this used to be a day club.
Then the freeway was built.
THEN Miniya Academies LLC bought the property and made it a charter school.
So, IMHO, all blame goes to Dayton SMART. (Who the fuck would want their kids to go there?)
This school apparently has tests scores well below the Ohio average. Big surprise.
Looking at the traffic flow, it looks like the ONLY way to get to this school is from the right lane, passing through the underpass. Elementary kids aside, this is a traffic safety nightmare. I thought Texas had bad zoning laws. Whoever approved this should have to work solely from this building for the rest of their life. Even the on/off ramp looks like a traffic nightmare.
Apparently you can do this as well. Nightmare intersection.
WTF is a “day club”?
🎶 fighter of the night club (ah-ah-aaaaah) 🎶
I’m guessing… the opposite of a night club?
Hey, there’s a sidewalk, that’s better than most cities in the US!
There’s a pedestrian path going to the left. Which even has a connection to a sidewalk and a bus route going there. For US standards this is basically a walkable city utopia
Just think of the pollution. The air, surrounded by heavy car traffic on all sides, must be outright toxic, never mind the noise, that maybe can be handled by very good windows (which I am not sure that building has).
The maybe craziest thing here might be that there is a safe underpass leading to the sidewalk of a much less terrifying street (the remnants of a main street, ravaged by neglect and car oriented developments), than that highway exit curve but it appears to be locked and blocked. I might be wrong but that doesn’t look like a path accessible to pupils or their parents.
It’s a charter school aka money grab.
It was never built to be a school. It was converted.
You could argue that these “public” charter schools exist because of lack of investment in public schooling, but that’s wasn’t the point of the post.
I mean, really it’s public schools are under funded so they can convince people to funnel money into charter schools so someone can get rich.
Correct
I’m baffled that this is legal. Those kids will be breathing traffic fumes all day. Tire dust, highway litter, it looks like a literally toxic environment for kids to spend most of their day for most of the year. And that’s apart from the fairly obvious danger of having high speed traffic right next to a school.
Edit: My son just came home from school and added noise, and that you can only go to school by car, not by bike or walking (although I understand that’s not unusual in the US).
Fortunately that brake and tire dust is just asbestos, metal particulate, and microplastic so they should be good
