I’m old and I still get surprise by how USA is addicted to cars.
you ever tried to get around USA?
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.
Yes, and it’s ridiculous. American car culture is a mental illness.
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 :(
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.
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
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?
How is this not considered a human rights abuse of children?
Children rights? Sounds like communism.
- actual US congress
Two federal appeals court judges appointed by Trump just ruled yesterday that the general public has no right to air in their homes free from tear gas, and therefore a lawsuit against ICE for heavily deploying tear gas (in a non-urgent situation no less) in a populated neighborhood has no merit for a suit.
Think about the implications of that in a country where life, liberty And the pursuit of happiness are the founding elements. Tear gas in your kitchen by state thugs.
I hope people are compiling a list of these fuckers so we know whose families to extradite from Argentina when this finally goes down.
You have no right to air in your home free from tear gas
Jesus-fucking-Christ that is unapologetically cruel
They go on the list. Let the grace and world they have envisioned for others be shared with them in turn. Funny how their perspective will suddenly change.
Trump just ruled yesterday that the general public has no right to air in their homes free from tear gas,
But lemme take a freakin guess: If you fart on the street when ICE agents are goose-stepping around, you’ll be lucky to escape alive for “deploying gas” and “assaulting an officer.”
I hope people are compiling a list of these fuckers so we know whose families to extradite from Argentina when this finally goes down.
And another list of state officials to replace the prisoners with. They deserve to enjoy the world they worked tirelessly to build.
Because they’re hispanic kids
(Obviously it ought to be seen as abuse - but this is the shithole world we live in)
In Ohio? Or outside of it?
Do they allow child workers in Ohio?
The Republican Party keeps trying.
Because I bet if you look at actual data you’ll find it’s just a poor school without a nice playground. Sad and could be fixed sure, but nobody is dying, nobody is screeching except the guy who had to go out and find the worst example they could 🤷
Your comment made me research your comment history, and it comes up to me as a miserable series of negative wording that contributes nothing of value or interest to the communities.
I don’t want and need such sentiment, and that’s the reason why I will block you after sending this comment. Blocking users in my eyes is a very important feature of the Fediverse and makes it palpable and nice. Other big platforms shove bullshit down your throat and are regulated top down - the Fediverse is different. I love it.
I wish you all the best and hope your life or at least your sentiment improves in the future. Have fun.
I have them tagged as “Dumbass AI Defender” and I can’t remember the comment that spurred that on but I do remember it being exceptionally dumb
Oh no, did I ruin the circle jerk? How many deaths at this school??!??? Is is really a death trap?
Great point, if they’re poor its fine because poor children don’t deserve happiness. The kids who get hit by cars or get sick from air pollution are statistically insignificant. It almost definitely won’t happen, and if it does, it doesn’t matter so long as they live to become workers and buy Amazon items, which is most important.
/s
Edit: like the person you responded to, I’m also blocking you now. They stated my reasons very well, and more kindly than I would.
Oh right, the roads made them poor 🤣
You’re kind of a shitty person
Kind of? LOL! I’d say extremely.
They cant see your comment.
And this attitude, friends, is why the United States is a shithole country.
I bet if you had gone to school here, you would be singing a different tune.
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As a thinking-out-loud digression, there was that movie several years ago, The Corporation, which took the idea of corporate personhood a step further, and psychoanalyzed them. (Spoiler: Corporations are extreme sociopaths.) I’ve talked to my brother, the professional therapist, about applying the same lens to cultures, and we agree: The United States is a deeply traumatized culture.
There are probably lots of reasons for it (settled by unpleasant weirdos who were kicked out of Europe, founded on genocide, slavery, a civil war, waves of immigrants who fled traumas in their home countries, etc.), but whatever the cause, this sort of shut-up-and-deal-with-it attitude that we don’t deserve a better physical environment feels like a trauma response at a societal level. (Also, see: The “I fear other people and don’t want to be near them” criticism of public transit.)
I’m an American immigrant in Germany, and looking at American culture with a bit more distance… yeah, 100%.
Personal space and general public respect are two areas where I notice it most- Germans are not an especially friendly or warm people (not a criticism, just a somewhat hackneyed observation), but they don’t require as much personal space, and even with a significantly more formal culture, strangers still yell at/aggress each other more frequently on the street, when someone’s doing something dickish or stupid, even in places big enough to be cities, but not big enough to give no fucks.
I was once awoken at ~4am by college kids drunkenly ringing everyone’s doorbells up and down my street. My first thought was, ”they’re gonna get shot.” My second thought was “they’re not gonna get shot- they’d probably be more polite if that was a risk.”
I think that explains the larger pattern as well: Americans are wary of each other. Not always, obviously, but generally speaking, anyone could be armed and anyone could be having a bad fucking day- I think that lurks in people’s subconscious and colors how people treat each other.
But we could fix it, if we tried, all together.
The cafeteria in question
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prison vibes
Looks like a set from Squid Games
Damn. Imagine going to school in two backroom levels at once.
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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
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?
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
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 imagine the discussion that resulted in this nightmare was quite racist. As soon as they realized the population they would be serving, they literally just said “Can’t we just put it under the freeway or something?”
Initial D vibes intensify
Multi track learning!
I don’t even see the sad excuse of a playground. Is it actually there?
On top near the bus you have a little triangle between the building and a tree.
With like…what…a bench and a single slide?
Weee, kids. Use your imaginations. :(
There’s a better angle on google maps, but it’s surprisingly hard to get the image from there. There’s a small jungle gym sort of thing. It’s more than just a slide, but not by much.
Well, at least they got the slide. My elementary school had a grassy field. They had us sell gift wrap over the holidays with the promise of a playground for our efforts… we sold the shit out of that wrapping paper and they didn’t actually build one until after I was in high school. This was a public school in a very wealthy community in Florida BTW.
(It was a very nice large field to be fair, we played a lot of tag and soccer over recess, but to make us work to pay for a playground we’d never get to enjoy is shitty.)
I attended a Catholic grade school in Ohio that straight up didnt have a playground or yard. Recess took place in the parking lot!
Was it D.C.E.S.? That’s where I went to Catholic grade school in Ohio. We also played in the parking lot at recess.
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
Notice how they have reviews disabled on Google Maps. I wonder how many bad reviews they had before they decided to disable it.
Google doesn’t allow reviews of schools anymore and removed all of the old ones. Happened pretty recently.
Oh, I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info.
What was Google’s reason for removing reviews of schools?
It’s probably like detention centers and doctors: If you have to go, you’re probably not having a good time. XD
Good point. I never thought about that.
it was supposed to be bulldozed for the road, they ‘saved it’
on one hand it’s horrible, on the other hand, is it worse than shoving that couple hundred students into the already overflowing schools by putting up more rental trailers outside the existing schools?
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:
PM 2.5 does worse things than just asthma.
more like cancer and a brain hemorrhage
Microplastics from tires is also extremely bad.
Think of what they’re breathing all day.
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
Not believing good change is possible is one of the pillars of conservatism. It leads to “why do what’s right?” and “I should just get what’s mine” and “if you can’t beat em, join em”
Cincinnati’s downtown has subway tunnels underneath it. They were built over a century ago. We could have had public transportation like NYC, in our quaint little Midwestern urban center. But unfortunately the project was scrapped to pay for WWI efforts and they’ve been abandoned ever since. The street car is a step in the right direction, but it’s a bit pathetic compared to what we could have.
Yeah, I’ve been bitching about that one for years. Just fucking put a train in it! Then up zone near the stations you build, the traffic patterns will shift to accommodate it
As another Ohioan I also find this to be true and so very weird.
I find that people in Ohio are generally some of the kindest people. I remember in college a blizzard hit and me and my three house mates spent the day helping anyone we saw get stuck in the snow for the whole day as a fun thing to do. When I graduated I hit some black ice and went off the road, not a minute had passed before a guy in a truck pulled over, hitched a strap to my car, and got me on my way.
I grew up outside Cleveland, I now live in a rural township outside Columbus with wonderful neighbors that all look out for each other. Even in a small township, we have little libraries, free food pantries stocked by the community outside the Kroger, volunteers that do trunk or treat for the children.
And yet when it comes time to vote, those same caring good hearted people will look at a $5 tax and say “fuck those school kids”
I left Ohio to find better work and came back once I could do that work from here. There are so many things I love about this state, it is my home, it is where my family is, it is a place of tremendous natural beauty and people who are for the most part friendly and kind. And those same people are sometimes just the most intolerant assholes.
Anyways, I believe Ohio can be a wonderful place, I moved back to make it more so. Hope you have a beautiful life wherever you are now, maybe enough of us will make it worth coming back to.
I think I have a slightly different perspective on the kindness of Ohioans given that I’m trans. On one hand, as you say, there is so much of it. Midwestern kindness still does exist and it’s something I cherish even more than the thriftiness. But on the other hand, over the years aggression has been rising there, especially from drivers, but from a lot of people.
I miss it to some degree, it was beautiful in its own way (ok, on the natural front Cincinnati and Cleveland more than Columbus and Dayton, but I love all 4 for their charms). I still go back to visit family for holidays. Most of my childhood friends have left now, but my family is still there, my mom is buried there, and I integrated myself pretty tightly in a community over the years before I moved away and I still like to visit them while seeing my family. I miss the bar I had my first date with my wife, the little bar I used to host and attend events at, and the little restaurant we started going to a lot after I quit meat. And I miss spaces that stopped existing long before I left even.
And oh how I miss the storms, especially the ones with a cataclysmic looking stormhead with winds that threaten to sweep you off your feet. The storms that make you feel like you’re seeing the wrath of the gods as the air pressure plummets and you’re feeling too light even before the wind comes. Every Midwesterner I talk to out here misses that.
But on the other hand, I fell in love with the PNW at first sight. I love the rain and trees and the fact that mountains and the sea are both accessible. While I have some culture shocks sometimes here it’s really compatible to me.
So yeah I hope you succeed. I left because they began passing anti trans laws and I figured it was best to leave on my own terms before they passed on that directly affected me and I had to rush out. Had 2024 gone differently, I’d probably own a house in Ohio now. And I do really hope nobody else like me, who could have lived happily there for life, has to leave in the future. I hope that I can continue visiting my loved ones and that my family and friends can have the state they deserve. I hope that someday the 3CD high speed line happens and that the 3Cs all have an urban rail and that there’s an intracity light rail connecting Cincinnati, Dayton, and the suburbs between. I hope the state can start scrubbing the rust off its belt and thrive.
And yeah my wife has been playing some game where you design train routes of real places that’s apparently based off the software that professionals use, and has spent the past week designing train systems for Ohio lol.
I think that is the worst part of MAGA, it emboldened people to embrace their worst aspects. Proudly and loudly ignorant and hateful.
They’ve at least been regaining some shame, I’ve seen a lot less flags, a lot fewer hats and shirts emblazoned with some hate filled garbage. They may still hold those terrible beliefs but they’ve shut up (and hopefully some have had a change of heart, but I suspect most are just angry about gas prices)
My spouse and I also loved the 10+ years we spent in California. Culture, art, great food, natural beauty, kind people (not Midwest nice, but nice in their own way).
I’m sorry you felt the need to leave Ohio, but I understand it and I’m happy you found a place to call home. Next thunderstorm I’ll send positive vibes your way, although it seems more likely we will be getting snow than rain (but with Ohio weather you never really know).
I hope wherever your life takes you, it is one filled with happiness, love, and joy.
Thanks lol, and I’m glad they’re regaining shame. And you enjoy your community out there! And I do sincerely hope the drivers get less aggressive for you than I remember them being.
I’m also an Ohio native who’s committed to sticking around and building community in an effort to improve things, rather than running away. I feel like it’s rare to see other people share that sentiment. All too often I hear people say they “escaped” Ohio and get patted on the back for it, and it’s just weird.
