Parents will get a final chance today to air concerns about a major redistricting in Cobb County history.
The county board of education will vote Thursday , after a 5:30 p.m. public hearing, on new attendance lines for two dozen elementary schools. The boundary revisions in South Cobb are to be phased in over the next two school years, and come after months of public meetings.
Some 15,000 students attend the affected schools, and 2,500 are slated for moves. Two buildings will be closed as students switch to newer and bigger facilities, in what officials have described as the largest redistricting ever for the system of 107,000 students.
Attendance lines need to follow population shifts, said school board member Alison Bartlett. "We have empty classrooms in some schools and trailers at other schools."
The new attendance lines should save money, too.
One of the closing schools, the Fitzhugh Lee campus of the H.A.V.E.N. Academy, was built more than a century ago. It costs more per square foot than new schools to maintain and to air condition, Bartlett said. The academy for special education students will move to Brown Elementary. The students now at Brown will move to a new, larger building in Smyrna, joining students from elsewhere.
Children from another closing school, Sky View Elementary, will merge with other students in a new Mableton school. The consolidations will save over $100,000 a year in busing costs alone, Bartlett said.
Some parents are unhappy with the move to bigger schools with bigger classrooms.
"We do not like the way that they are going to increase the classroom sizes," said Aisha Alston, the president of the parent-teacher association at Brown. She said the small rooms kept student-teacher ratios down.
"A lot of people were disgruntled about the decision," Alston said. "Some parents who have decided to stick it out are probably going to give it a year."
Others were satisfied though.
Jamie Hughes lobbied the school system to put her neighborhood in the new Smyrna Area Elementary. Her home was zoned for another school that had failed federal achievement benchmarks.
"The whole neighborhood is thrilled. People who were going to move aren't going to move anymore," Hughes said.
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