I'm old and I still get surprise by how USA is addicted to cars.

But we could fix it, if we tried, all together.

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.

How is this not considered a human rights abuse of children?

The cafeteria in question

If you are going to treat children like this, just don't have them.

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'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).

Initial D vibes intensify

No surprises here.

Serving 94 students in grades Kindergarten-6, Dayton Smart Elementary School ranks in the bottom 50% of all schools in Ohio for overall test scores (math proficiency is bottom 50%, and reading proficiency is bottom 50%).

The percentage of students achieving proficiency in math is 11-19% (which is lower than the Ohio state average of 54%). The percentage of students achieving proficiency in reading/language arts is 40-49% (which is lower than the Ohio state average of 60%).

The student-teacher ratio of 16:1 is lower than the Ohio state level of 17:1.

Minority enrollment is 93% of the student body (majority Hispanic), which is higher than the Ohio state average of 35% (majority Black and Hispanic).

I honestly thought there's no way this is real but after seeing the comments and searching online, on the school's own location link:

Good gods that is miserably tragic

I don't even see the sad excuse of a playground. Is it actually there?

I would be most worried about the things you can't see on pictures: air and noise pollution. I imagine graduation looks something like this:

Think of what they're breathing all day.

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.

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.

https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/8/17/inside-the-on-ramp-this-school-may-have-americas-worst-location

heres more info

You'll never guess the skin color of the kids we put in there.

Oh yeah, Dayton is just like that. It's got so many issues along those lines and is just generally a pretty depressing city. Great oktoberfest though.

And Ohio in particular has a cultural issue where people don't seem to believe change for the better is possible. A lot of people disengage rather than acknowledge that at the local level of government a fuck ton of real change can happen. Columbus should have a light rail system, whether elevated or underground, but if you talk to people there it just isn't feasible because they tried to put in a rail system already, but it didn't work (they couldn't get the money because of the oil crisis in the 70s and stopped trying afterwards).

I love Ohio in a lot of ways, it's home, but thank fuck I'm gone

This is some I just learned how to play cities skylines bullshit

They have a virtual tour of the inside of the building, if you'd like to get really depressed.

I drive past that school pretty often. I always forget it is a school, it looks more like a truck depot from the outside.

Dayton Public Schools have tons of hard to solve problems. Its test scores are bad. Parent Involvement is nonexistent. The state forcing the system to give bussing priority to private school students. A corrupt School board that was caught buying every student a hoodie that they couldn't wear to school because it violates dresscode.

A series of failed levees partially because of the corruption, partially because Dayton is an Automotive rust belt town. Several of Library's in the city close when school lets out because Students would leave school and start fights at the library.

The crosswalk to the school CROSSES A FREAKING OFF-RAMP!!!

Edit after some research: The street the ramp comes off of has a speed limit of 35mph (55kph), and the crosswalk is metered, so it could be worse

POV me when I am playing cities skylines and I plop city services in "optimal central location"