Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Tough choices to tear down schools
Dayton schools Thursday for the first time spelled out which schools will be rebuilt and which will be torn down for all four phases of its school construction program. The board will vote on the plan Wednesday, but few board members seemed to have any concerns about the proposals at Thursday’s meeting.
See the complete list of what schools are in the plan vs. those that will be torn down here.
The board was forced to make tough choices because the state has reduced the size of the program in response to steep enrollment declines. This means some neighborhoods that expected to get new schools won’t get them now.
Some of the bigger surprises that I noticed from the list:
- Patterson-Kennedy Elementary School, a large school on Wyoming Street serving the closeby South Park neighborhood, is out of the plan. P-K is on an awful site. It’s a very small property surrounded by dense commercial and residential areas. But I am not sure where these kids will go now. The next closet schools appear to be Ruskin, Cleveland and Horace Mann. None are all that close.
- Two current high performers — Meadowdale and Franklin elementaries — will be torn down. I think the district wants to use the Meadowdale site to expand Meadowdale High School’s property (they share a site) and Franklin, a 100-year-old school, is landlocked by crowded residential areas much like Patterson-Kennedy.
- There is only one school on the plan in Old North Dayton. It’s Kiser Elementary School on Leo Street, which opens later this year. The district does not plan to rebuild Allen, Van Cleve, McGuffey, Gorman or Webster. Construction chief John Carr said there are just not very many kids who attend the district that live in Old North Dayton. The nearby Parkside Homes housing project has lots of kids, but Carr said the city has told him they will raze Parkside within two years. Carr said the district projects that those families will move north and west rather than stay in Old North Dayton.
- On the other hand, Eastmont Elementary School is in the plan. Eastmont is at the far eastern edge of Dayton, barely within the district. It serves a very nice suburban-style (and nearly all-white) neighborhood, but not that many kids in the surrounding area actually attend the district. (I suspect many of them go to private schools, and there are a lot of homes with no kids in that part of town too.) In early versions of the master plan, the Eastmont site was considered for a Montessori or other magnet school with the idea of drawing kids out to an otherwise fairly sparse area. But some within the district have advocated for putting a new school at Eastmont in hopes of attracting new families back into the district.
- Hickorydale was the last school scratched from the plan. The district was close to starting construction at the site but the state’s enrollment projections were worse than expected, forcing school officials to find one more school to delete. Hickorydale drew the short straw.
- Carr asked the board to decide between the Carlson Elementary School site at 807 S. Gettysburg Ave and the Residence Park site at 833 Elmhurst Road for the last school site to make the plan. Board members told Carr they preferred Residence Park because the nearby streets were less busy and it would be closer to a populated neighborhood. This will be the site of the rebuilt WOW school, the former charter school that now is back under the district’s umbrella.
- The kids at Colonel White high School have long known they were moving to the new Marshall High School, but the expectation was that a new elementary school would be built at its vacant 501 Niagara site, in the middle of an populated residential neighborhood. The tight enrollment projections forced the board to drop that plan.
- Speaking of high schools, the state projects 1,000 fewer high school students by 2010. But the board just flat does not believe those numbers. High school enrollment has held steady at about 5,000 for many years, even during the heavy enrollment losses to mostly elementary-level charter schools over the past five years. The board doesn’t know where the state thinks those 1,000 kids will go. Dayton’s two private high schools — Chaminade-Julienne and Carroll —could not absorb that many kids and most of the charter high schools are focused on dropouts and don’t compete directly with the district’s high schools. As a result, Datyon decided to go ahead and build six high schools. They will be smaller than originally planned, but built to be easily expandable if more classroom.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, School Construction
Comments
By Mary
June 30, 2006 3:20 PM | Link to this
If people put as much energy, money and attention into the learning aspects and curriculum of education as they did brick and mortar, where would we be. It is amazing so many buildings have to be razed and then rebuilt. The book Cheating our Kids - How politics and greed ruin education, I believe, brought up some issues on the construction aspects of schools. Do certain groups make a lot of money over the school construction business?