Columbus board to hear panel’s recommendations at special meeting today

The Columbus Dispatch

12/20/2005

By Bill Bush

Twelve inner-city Columbus schools should close this summer and four others a year later if their enrollment doesn’t increase, a task force recommended to the district yesterday.

Gene Harris, superintendent of Columbus Public Schools, said she will take that recommendation to the school board at a special meeting at 3 p.m. today.

“We heard a lot of commitment to schools that were under consideration, a lot of passion around schools,” said task force co-chairman Floyd Jones after the panel’s unanimous vote. “I think there’s going to be disappointment and frustration from many of the affected constituencies.

“However, having said that, I think that the greater, larger community understands, as Superintendent Harris has said, the need to allocate resources toward the longer-term goal of improving academic performance.”

Jones is a vice president of The Dispatch Printing Company, publisher of The Dispatch.

The closings are in response to an enrollment drop of more than 7,100 students as more charter schools have lured them and their state-aid payments away.

The district plans on losing as much as $50 million in state aid to charter schools this school year. And it projects that number could continue to mushroom in coming years with the arrival next fall of a state-funded voucher program, offering parents money for tuition-funded private schools.

Harris, who has sat in on the task force’s meetings and whose top-level staff was assigned to the task force in late September, said yesterday that she has no objections to the panel’s recommendations.

“The recommendations are interrelated, and if you take one off, there is a ripple effect,” Harris said.

Two of the schools recommended to close – Crestview Middle School and Gladstone Elementary – are on a list of buildings set for improvements under a 38-school reconstruction effort funded by a $392 million bond levy passed in 2002.

It isn’t clear whether the money to rebuild those two schools would be used to replace two other buildings or offset inflation in the rest of the rebuilding project, said Paul Goggin, who is on both the school-closing task force and the citizen panel that oversees the rebuilding project.

Despite inflation, Columbus can still afford the entire 38-building project, said Rick Savors, spokesman for the Ohio School Facilities Commission. The commission is funding about 30 percent of the project.

The district hasn’t applied to amend its master plan, he said.

All of the schools on the closing list are on the city’s South Side and in an area north of Downtown.

bbush@dispatch.com

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