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

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

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

Initial D vibes intensify

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

heres more info

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.

The cafeteria in question

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

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).

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.

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

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

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.

Think of what they're breathing all day.

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

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: