The following is Mark Rosenthal’s statement to the Arlington School Committee Community Relations Subcommittee on May 31, 2012.
My name is Mark Rosenthal. In your latest draft of the redistricting map, my house has been moved into Buffer Zone H.
In the late 1980s we bought a house on Walnut St. because it’s a 3-1/2 block walk to the Brackett and most of that is on local streets where there’s no traffic or through Robbins Farm Park. My kids attended Brackett. We suffered through a year of them being bused to Stratton while Brackett was being rebuilt, but we did so happily because at the end of it we’d end up with a much better facility for our school.
Even after my kids graduated from Brackett, I’ve voted for every override because I felt it was the right thing to do.
Now you’ve created Buffer Zone H, which unlike all the other buffer zones leaves you uncertain whether your child will have a 3-1/2 block walk to school or have to take a bus. I’ve been told by a realtor that about 60-70% of home buyers in my neighborhood have young children or are planning families, and their first question is what school their children will go to. Nobody makes the largest purchase of their life if they’re uncertain of what they’re buying. So, if I as a seller answer, “Gee I can’t really tell you. It might be a short safe walk to Brackett or it might be a bus ride to Bishop,” they’ll walk out the door and find a comparable house that’s not in a buffer zone where the owner can tell them, “Your child can walk to Brackett,” or “Your child can walk to Bishop.”
So, now you’ve cut my pool of interested buyers down to 30 to 40% of what it otherwise would be. The law of supply and demand dictates that my house price will drop. With 6 or 7 out of 10 of my potential buyers removed from the picture, I’d expect the drop in my potential selling price to be at least 10%, if not more!
Whenever the town has asked for an override, they’ve argued to those who no longer have children in school that voting for the override is in our interest because it will protect our property values. If, by your actions, I lose the equivalent of a full year of my child’s college tuition, or more, I’m going to feel that I’ve already paid the equivalent of the next 100 years of overrides! And, I’m going to be more motivated to get involved than I ever have been in the past!
In the last override, even though the majority of Precinct 14, which includes your proposed Buffer Zone H, voted in favor of the override, it only passed by a margin of 860 votes.
Buffer Zone H, which you’ve made uniquely undesirable by making it a crap shoot whether children are going to have a nice safe walk or be bussed, has 645 households with roughly 1,000 voting-age adults. If just 400 of those 1,000 voters swing from the “for” column to the “against” column, future overrides will have no chance.
I’m not the only person in Buffer Zone H who feels that, if the School Dept. has destroyed a year’s worth of their child’s college tuition money, the promise that passing an override will protect their property values is going to ring mighty hollow!
