How school closure impacted a community

One day, she thought, her son might walk to school with his friends. “It’s very exciting to have a school to get behind, to get in there and physically change something,” she said.

But three years ago, DeKalb County school officials decided Forrest Hills Elementary was too small to remain open, and neighbors say its closure has changed their community in palpable ways.

Formerly active residents and many young parents have moved away. Community gatherings have grown smaller. The recession makes the impact on property values hard to determine, but many residents believe they’ve been damaged. And the sense of neighborhood renewal and momentum that the effort to better its school fostered has diminished.

As DeKalb and other cash-strapped metro school districts again eye closing schools, Forrest Hills serves as a reminder that the decision is among the most momentous a board of education can make. It affects not only the children, parents and teachers of the facility, it can ripple through the surrounding community.

Last month, after emotionally charged public hearings, a DeKalb citizens group tasked with deciding which schools to close to help ease a $115 million deficit, recommended not closing any and passed the issue back to the board.

Tiffany Holloway, PTA president of Sky Haven Elementary, one of 10 DeKalb schools considered for closure, summed up the feelings involved at a recent task force hearing: “I treat the school like it’s my house. I’m not going to let a mortgage company come in and take my house.”

Michele Ritan, a 12-year Forrest Hills resident and former neighborhood association president, understands those feelings.

“It was a tremendous blow to the neighborhood, a disappointment,” she said of her school’s closure. “Bottom line, people have moved. The neighborhood has no school and the building is vacant and being vandalized.”

A walk to school

Forrest Hills, a post-World War II neighborhood sandwiched between Decatur and Avondale Estates in unincorporated DeKalb, was a testament to urban stability: While nearby communities witnessed white flight and decreasing property values, residents here remained.

Betsy Lamoureux, a recent widow who is now 65, was among a new wave of residents 30 years ago replacing the old-timers who built the homes.

“At one time we had an excellent school, and an excellent school means everything to a community,” said Lamoureaux, who sent a son and daughter to Forrest Hills Elementary in the 1980s and served as PTA president. “It was diverse socially, racially and it had some moderately handicapped students.”

The school fell off in quality a bit in the late 1980s, she said, but residents’ kids continued to attend.

Hal Jacobs, an editor at Emory University, has lived there nearly 20 years. He sent two sons there in the 1990s.

“That’s why we moved to the neighborhood, to be able to walk to school,” Jacobs said. “It was a good mix of kids from the neighborhood and working-class kids. The scale of the school [with about 250 students] was nice. These are nice, natural settings compared to the mega-schools in Gwinnett.”

In the early 1990s, the school was about evenly split between white and black students. But the elementary-aged children from the neighborhood grew up and moved on through the school system.

By the early 2000s, the school population was about 90 percent black, many of those students coming from apartments north of the Forrest Hills neighborhood. The school’s annual turnover approached 50 percent, with very few children from the predominantly white Forrest Hills neighborhood attending.

“For many years, parents with school-age children would move,” said Ritan. “It’s destabilizing to a neighborhood.”

Rebirth, then closure

In 2004, with more young people buying homes in the area, a group of residents put together the Forrest Hills Elementary Community Coalition to get neighbors invested in the school again. The mission statement was a challenge to many of the new professionals who had moved into the neighborhood: “The time has come for parents with children under four (babies and toddlers too) to get involved. Every successful intown school has hard-working and dedicated parents.”

Residents with young children got involved. People were excited. They raised money for supplies at the school, tutored students, held cleanup days. Test scores were rising, although they were still lower than the county average. As more people got involved, more residents vowed to send their children to the neighborhood school.

But in 2007, the district announced it would be closed, one of five small neighborhood schools it closed at the time. It was just too small, officials said, even though an addition had been built less than a decade before.

Resident Denise Reidy-Puckett, one of the founders of the school support group, had hoped to walk her daughter to school when she started kindergarten in 2008. Instead, she helped start another campaign — to get the school district to allow the International Community School, a charter school housed in a church a couple of miles away, to relocate to Forrest Hills.

The district, which had never allowed a startup charter school to move into a system-owned building, declined to do so.

Forrest Hills’ closing meant children from the neighborhood would be sent to Midway Elementary about two miles away, but very few, if any, go there, neighbors say. Midway’s test scores are about the same as Forrest Hills, but residents don’t connect to it as their neighborhood school.

Many neighborhood children now attend the International Community School. Others plan to attend the Museum School of Avondale Estates, another charter school set to open this fall, while many families have chosen to send their children to private schools.

And some residents, like Reidy-Puckett, who led the efforts to improve Forrest Hills and obtain the charter school, have moved away. She now lives near Northlake, where the area schools have better test scores.

‘It changed us’

Residents still have hopes of seeing the school reopened one day. Currently it sits, mothballed, almost looking like it’s just a long weekend and children could be running into the building again come Monday.

“They took away the neighborhood school. It changed us. It changed the neighborhood,” said Lisa Prodigo-Nimorwicz, a teacher who moved to the neighborhood 12 years.

Lamoureux, who sent her children to the local school in the 1980s, has looked into moving from time to time but has never found a neighborhood with the same feel. In fact, she recently built an addition onto her home. Losing active neighbors like Reidy-Puckett can only hurt the community, she said.

“Younger people with children are moving in; we want to keep them,” Lamoureux said. “They’re the lifeblood of a neighborhood. I don’t want to see them go.

“Who wants a neighborhood of old people?” she said, laughing, before adding, “Of which I’m one of now.”

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DeKalb school closings

On Monday, the DeKalb County school board will discuss closing four schools to help chip away at a $115 million budget deficit. Dan Drake, the district’s planner, has recommended closing Gresham Park, Kelley Lake, Knollwood and Peachcrest elementary schools.

Those schools, all in south DeKalb, house 1,316 of the district’s 101,000 students but have a combined 885 empty seats. The closures could save the district $2.2 million. The four schools came from a list of 10 a task force compiled after reviewing data on the district’s 83 elementary schools.

The board meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. at the William Bradley Bryant Center of Technology, 2652 Lawrenceville Highway in Decatur. More infomation can be found online at www.dekalb.k12.ga.us .