Wednesday, December 12, 2001
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Wednesday, December 12, 2001 |
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School board axes Katz site By DAVE HAMRICK
The Fayette County Board of Education made several hundred friends Monday night by doing nothing. Swamped with phone calls and e-mails from parents, the board has decided to put off plans for a third elementary school and keep looking for land near the Peachtree City/Tyrone border. The schools are being built as part of a five-year program funded by bonds approved by voters last year. Cleveland Elementary in west Fayetteville and Minter Elementary south of town are under construction, and new boundaries based on those schools will go into effect next fall. A new high school is scheduled to open in 2004-05, and new attendance lines for both middle and high schools will go into effect then. After taking public comment in a hearing Monday night, the Board of Education plans to vote on attendance districts for both of those scenarios in its regular business meeting this coming Monday at 7 p.m. But after 14 months of looking in vain for a building site in the north Peachtree City/south Tyrone area, the board had decided to put that school on the well-known Katz property north of Ga. highways 54 and 74 on Peachtree City's west side. The proposed Katz school site, on land donated by John Wieland Homes as part of its deal with Peachtree City to annex 80 acres earlier this year, lies to the west of the CSX railroad tracks and to the north of existing Wynnmeade and Cedarcroft subdivisions. But when school boundary lines based on a new school in that location were made public, that plan proved to be highly unpopular. Hundreds of residents of subdivisions in Peachtree City's Kedron Village, among others, turned out for the school board's public hearing on the new boundary lines Monday night, many of them sporting buttons calling for changes in those lines. Eighty signed up to speak, which would have taken more than six and a half hours if each spoke for the five minutes allowed. But most deferred their comments until later after learning that it's back to the drawing board. Those concerned with the Katz school who did speak said the plan would have resulted in neighborhoods being split, with lifelong friends being sent to different schools, and in some cases students traveling much farther to get to their new schools. Board member Janet Smola, in announcing the change, said it wasn't just the negative public reaction that prompted a return to the property search. "Upon examination of these maps, it appears the greater need for an elementary school may lie in the north Peachtree City/south Tyrone area," she said. Development has slowed down in the area around the Katz property, she said. She also promised that public comment will be invited once a site is found and the lines drawn for the school. "It is not our intention to spring this map on the public in a devious manner in the future," she vowed. Earlier this year, the board actually placed a contract on property in the desired border area, but the land failed the perk test for a septic system, and sewerage is not available. The change in plans is really a change back to the original plan, schools Superintendent John DeCotis told The Citizen. "We weren't supposed to build that school until the third year [of the bond program], and had moved it up to the second year," he said. "There's still no hurry on it," he added. Officials Monday said that, even if a new site is found for the third school, land donated by developers of the Katz property will still be needed in the future. The school system is growing at a rate of 450 students a year, said assistant Superintendent Stuart Bennett. "That's one elementary school every two years, a middle school every three years and a high school every four or five years," he said.
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