The Columbus Dispatch

12/7/2006

Bill Bush

A task force yesterday named seven Columbus Public Schools that could close at the end of this school year because of falling district enrollment.

The task force, which had identified nine possibilities last week, yesterday trimmed the list while continuing to discuss how changing enrollment trends should affect the next phase of the district’s $1.6 billion project to update all of its school buildings.

A Dispatch analysis of Superintendent Gene Harris’ new priorities for the rebuilding project shows that schools in Linden, the University District and on the North Side have been replaced by schools closer to the district’s growing fringes.

“We have areas that are growing (in numbers of students) and we have areas that are declining,” Harris said of her proposal, noting that thousands of inner-city students have moved to charter schools.

After reviewing criteria such as enrollment trends and spare capacity needed to transfer students to nearby schools, the task force targeted four elementary schools and three middle schools for possible closure.

They are: Douglas Alternative, Fifth Avenue Alternative, Linden Park I.G.E. Alternative and Medary elementary schools, and Eastmoor, Linmoor and Medina middle schools. The panel removed two alternative middle schools, Franklin and Monroe, from the preliminary list because each had waiting lists of more than 100 students trying to gain admission.

The panel’s co-chairman, Floyd Jones - a senior vice president of The Dispatch Printing Company, publisher of The Dispatch - said that the panel won’t recommend closing all seven schools remaining because their students would overload surrounding schools.

Jones said it appeared the district had enough space at nearby buildings to close one or two of the elementaries and one of the middle schools.

The committee is to decide on a recommendation to the school board next week after considering special programs offered at some buildings and how closures would alter “feeder patterns” into district high schools.

While the district is losing central-city students, it could see an explosion of additional students from new and planned Columbus subdivisions near the fringes of Franklin County, said Kevin Wheeler, assistant administrator with the Columbus Planning Division.

Under a 1986 legal pact commonly referred to as “Win-Win,” Columbus Public Schools agreed to allow suburban school districts to serve areas of Columbus so long as property annexing into the city after the pact was signed was served by the city schools.

The result were “Win-Win islands” that are in the Columbus Public Schools but are not contiguous to the core district. No schools exist in these areas, so students who live there are bused to buildings in the core district.

In the northeastern corner of Franklin County alone, the city projects that up to 6,600 singlefamily houses and 6,700 apartment units eventually could be built, Wheeler told the task force.

These trends - losing students in the district’s center and gaining them back on the fringes - drove the changes to the third segment of the building program, Harris said.

Harris proposes to better serve these growth areas by building a new elementary school near New Albany. Also, she would advance three schools - Dominion Middle, Olde Orchard and Liberty elementaries - into the next building segment from later segments and increase their planned size. Lastly, she would increase the size of two schools that were already in Segment 3, Georgian Heights Alternative and Winterset elementaries.

“We didn’t want you to think that we had thought about just (how to serve) the northeast” area near New Albany, and not the other growing areas of Columbus served by city schools, she told the panel.

The Segment 3 plan still will face approval by the school board and then the voters, who must decide whether to raise property taxes to pay for it. Public meetings are to be held on the plan, possibly starting later this month.

It won’t be an easy task explaining to some district residents that their school needed to close or move further down the construction schedule so that schools in other neighborhoods can be built or improved, said Board of Education member W. Carlton Weddington. It could divide the community, he said.

“What I would hope is that we do our job explaining that this is about the growth of the district,” Weddington said. “I would hope that (voters) would look at the bigger picture.”

bbush@dispatch.com

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