Somerset Academy Coral Gables

Decision:  Commission decided to go to court tomorrow to challenge the Somerset Academy’s charter school.

The Somerset Academy has been quite adept at mobilizing future parents of students to support their request to, in effect, start operating outside the rules of Coral Gables and under threat of a suit against the City to enforce their expansion into a quiet, local neighborhood.

Somerset Academy continues working with the City of Coral Gables to obtain the necessary approvals to open Somerset Academy at UBC this fall.  With your continued support, we are very confident that the school will open in the fall with enough spaces to fill the needs of our families, while maintaining the fabric of the community and neighborhood surrounding the school.

The City of Coral Gables Commission will meet this Monday, July 19th, at 4:00 pm to consider Somerset Academy’s request to open the Somerset Gables Charter School at UBC. The City Commissioners will meet privately from 4:00-5:00pm.

A public meeting will follow immediately at 5pm in the Commission chambers at Coral Gables City Hall. THIS IS YOUR OPPORTUNITY TO SHOW YOUR SUPPORT FOR SOMERSET GABLES IN PERSON. The school will present evidence to support its request for sufficient capacity to satisfy the overwhelming parental demand.  The public will have an opportunity to speak to the Commission, time will be limited.

Somerset Academy thanks you for your continued support of Somerset @ Gables.

Notes from the Discussion: None of the Commissioners want to go to the judge and lose.  At the start of the discussion of this matter, Mayor Slesnick favors an agreement with the school but for around 180 students and Commissioner Anderson favors an agreement with around  200 students.  Commission Cabrera favors more and better schools, he criticizes the lack of information that he has gotten from the City’s staff, he cannot agree to a large number of students, 525, that the Somerset Academy is proposing.  Commissioners seem to want a total number of students in the agreement of about 200.  Somerset Academy takes time to discuss among themselves.

Coral Gables TV…

…is a disaster.  In the middle of a detailed presentation by a lawyer representing neighborhood interests against a charter school, a Spanish language news program was broadcast simultaneously.  What a shame and what incompetence.

Does Coral Gables Have Pundit Shock??

According to Paul Krugman, Obama will pay the price of playing politics with the stimulus package:

The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True, senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it won its first big Congressional test.

In short, it looks as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion, focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on their actual impact on the economy.

Taxpayers in Coral Gables will pay the price for the Commissioners believing in the real estate optimism (called marketing) that the Coral Gables economy will come back in the next year, or so.  The “or so” is the most likely, and trained observes say that it will not take months, but years, for the economy to come back.  There is nothing special about Coral Gables that makes it exceptional.

Hence the Commissioners should push for a bigger budget tightening than they are doing now to fit with the new culture of austerity.