Wednesday, May 9, 2001
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Wednesday, May 9, 2001 |
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FCHS over capacity; BOE mulls its options Board rules out redrawing attendance lines before 2004. One idea: Use old FCHS for 9th grade By MONROE ROARK
County school officials spent some time Monday trying to figure out how to relieve overcrowding at Fayette County High School before a fifth county high school is opened. A number of options were mentioned at Monday night's Board of Education work session, from adding even more trailers to relocating the ninth grade to LaFayette Educational Center to asking for student volunteers to transfer to Sandy Creek High. Plans for a new high school have already been put in motion, but that campus, to be south of Fayetteville, will not be opened before fall 2004 at the earliest. Meanwhile, Fayette County High is already above its core capacity and has about 1,000 more students than Sandy Creek, school board member Janet Smola said Monday. What might seem like the simplest solution changing the boundary lines is not so simple with the new school on the horizon. School officials want to avoid making students change districts now only to have to change again in three years. "All possible moves have ramifications," Superintendent John DeCotis said of the various possiblities for overcrowding relief. "The bottom line is, the student population is growing all over the county, and something will have to give." School system staff emphasized that a key component of any solution would be finding areas without mass student movement, and preventing incidences where students would have to drive past one school to attend another. School official Jerry Whitaker showed board members a map of possible changes, saying that research is ongoing to develop what he called "a definitive feeder pattern," where all students at a particular elementary school would go to the same middle school and high school. The newest elementary school to be constructed in the area will be Cleveland Elementary on Lester Road. The site is right now at the western edge of Fayetteville and might be annexed into the city. Depending upon how the boundary lines are constructed, students from that school could end up at Sandy Creek or Fayette County High, Whitaker said. Smola said that her chief concern is what the possible addition of trailers at Fayette County would do to safety concerns, especially while Sandy Creek is not yet at its core capacity. A study has begun to determine the logistics of putting the entire ninth-grade class from Fayette County at LaFayette Center, which housed Fayette County High before the current campus was built. That would fill the center's 'D' building and essentially create a new school of some 600 students, according to staff. If that were done, efforts would have to be made to keep movement across Tiger Trail to a minimum, but it would not be unavoidable, because ninth-grade students take more electives than other grades and most teachers do not teach only one grade. Research by county staff shows that LaFayette Center would likely need improvements to its lunchroom facilities to accommodate these students, along with the addition of a media center, foreign language lab, writing lab and science lab. The required improvements, plus hiring of faculty and staff to manage the facility, would take an entire school year. School board members indicated Monday that immediate redistricting is not a worthwhile option because they do not want any students moving twice. They directed DeCotis and the staff to keep looking at short-term solutions like the LaFayette option, and perhaps convincing some students to voluntarily transfer to Sandy Creek, in which case the county would work out a bus schedule to get them there. The board will probably discuss the matter again at the next meeting, scheduled for May 21.
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