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Time for next issue

| June 6, 2010 9:00 PM

May the debate over IB/PYP RIP.

Tomorrow at 5 p.m., the Coeur d'Alene School District Board of Trustees is expected to vote on a controversial proposal to start classes an hour later on Mondays and extend the school day slightly to allow for planning and collaboration. In other business, the board will look at "schools of choice." Members of the board might or might not utter the acronyms "IB" (International Baccalaureate) or "PYP" (Primary Years Programme), and we suspect that's fine with the vast majority of District 271 students and patrons.

It isn't as if either side in the IB/PYP debate has been neglected or silenced. In this newspaper, hundreds of thousands of words have been devoted to the subject, including letters to the editor, news stories, feature stories, meeting stories, op-ed pieces, My Turn columns, online comments and news briefs. In April and May alone, IB/PYP was a focal point in dozens of articles amounting to 21,938 published words.

Even if it chooses to be silent on the subject, the school board will be speaking volumes.

IB and PYP are here to stay.

We appreciate the citizens who have brought to light facts and their interpretation of the ramifications of those facts on both sides of the IB/PYP fence. But we fully support the school board in continuing to offer IB and PYP curriculum in select public schools because we believe the district must better meet the demands of a discerning consumer base and compete with virtual, charter, private and religious schools by offering patrons greater choices.

We also believe that in the name of choice, the district should provide transportation to patrons whose preferences may lead them away from Hayden Meadows, the district's only PYP school, to Atlas or Dalton elementary schools.

There is another choice readily available for those unhappy that the board is continuing its IB/PYP offerings: That is the choice to run for school board seats themselves. If they can't change important policy from without, they're free to try to do so from within.