Flowers: District lines need close look
By Steve Herring
Published in News on January 19, 2015 1:46 PM
Instead of building a new middle school in the northwestern part of the county, the Wayne County Board of Education should look first at "tweaking" district lines to address capacity concerns, board member Arnold Flowers said.
"This is my fifth year on the board, and we have never had a serious conversation as a board about school capacity or school district lines," Flowers said. "It is like a taboo. It is like school district lines are set in stone. Well, we have two schools that are coming online in the next school year. In my opinion, it is the perfect time to start having some work sessions. All of that demographic information is out there.
"Look at the political district lines. They are so chopped up. I don't want to do that to school district lines. As a board what I am throwing out there to the rest of the board is this is something that I feel we should look at and have work sessions on. To be honest, it should have been looked at 15 years ago or longer."
Flowers prefaced his remarks during the board comments portion of the latest school board meeting by saying that he wanted to talk about school capacity.
The county is over capacity on both the elementary and high school levels, he said.
"These numbers are just numbers," he said. "I will be the first to admit when you are looking at capacities and things like that, there are a whole lot of things that go into play that I don't fully understand, but I am just telling you what I have been reading."
The county has four middle schools, Brogden, Dillard, Greenwood and Mount Olive, and some middle high schools so it is "a little bit complicated," Flowers said.
All four of the middle schools are at capacity, he said.
"Now we are building two middle schools as we speak (Grantham and Spring Creek)," Flowers said. "The plan, the current plan we have, our long-range facility plan, is that the next thing we would do is build another middle school in the northwest part of the county.
"But if you look at our numbers, we've got middle school capacity today. We don't have high school capacity, and we don't have elementary school capacity. It appears to me the reason the argument is out there is that we need another middle school in the northwest community is specifically, I think, because Northwest Elementary as we speak is 252 students over capacity. But if you look at all of the capacity that we have in the county, it jumps out that maybe we don't need another middle school, we just need to balance what we have."
The way to balance it, and the controversial part, he said, is to redraw school district lines.
Flowers pulled out a large map of elementary district lines that he said he received the first year he served on the board.
He pointed out that the Northwest Elementary and Fremont Elementary districts adjoin each other. Fremont is under capacity while Northwest is 252 over capacity, he said.
"It seems like a simple thing to look at. I am not talking about an overall cataclysmic event of school district lines, but we as a board need to start looking at tweaking our district lines over time because it would be a very simple matter to take students," he said. "If you were to take some students, 50 students in the top portion of the Northwest (district) and move them over to Fremont, you would open up two classrooms at Northwest.
"That wouldn't make the whole county mad, but would probably make a few parents mad, but not make everybody mad at one time. I don't know what the answers are, but it seems like to me in our planning at this point we have looked at an individual tree, but not the whole forest, the whole forest being the complete countywide capacity that we have."