More kids stick with Buckhead schools

The new school’s location is secret, pending a final contract for land. In the meantime, parents are beginning to celebrate this milestone, one that will be realized in steel and brick: a state-of-the-art facility, football stadium and 21st-century technology. The urban school, not likely to mirror its behemoth suburban counterparts, could cost $35 million to $45 million, according to Atlanta officials, although that price does not include land.

The recession and its impact on household budgets may have had something to do with the need for a new school. White collar job losses have forced some parents to cut out private school tuition, which can top $20,000 annually. But parents say much of the area’s surging enrollment centers around a lot more of them believing in the city’s public education system.

“It is a vote of confidence that APS knows what leaps and bounds this North Atlanta cluster is making,” said Beth Ryan, PTA co-president of Buckhead’s Sutton Middle School.

Nancy Dillon, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Buckhead, said families without children in public schools often move out of the city because of its higher taxes. “But if they think their money is going toward something good, you’ve got something that’s a draw,” Dillon said of the new high school. “It’s all about quality.”

Buckhead’s gain comes at a time when Atlanta has closed schools in other areas of the city because of underenrollment. Real estate agents say it can do nothing but help property values. And energized parents are already peppering system officials with ideas. That includes a plea to let kids stay together during their middle school years by using Sutton as a “sixth-grade academy” and sending seventh- and eighth-graders to what is now the North Atlanta High campus. Such a move would preserve Sutton’s internationally designated curriculum as well as stave off arguments over new attendance zones if there were two separate middle schools.

“We just feel like everyone’s on board,” said Leigh Ann Livaditis, one of those parents who expected to be writing checks to a private school once her kids hit sixth grade. Livaditis’ husband attended Sutton in the 1970s when it was Dykes High School, although it was not nostalgia that kept them in the public education fold. Rather, they loved the middle school’s International Baccalaureate program — which their elementary school also uses. It did not hurt that Sutton received a $22 million renovation in 2006.

“We thought, ‘Why in the world would you not come here for sixth grade?’ ” said Livaditis, who is now Sutton’s other PTA co-president. “A lot of people move in crowds. In a way, I feel I broke out of that.”

The Buckhead cluster contains six elementary schools, Sutton Middle and North Atlanta High School, which offers an International Baccalaureate program begun in 1982 — the Southeast’s oldest.

Still, “parents had a perception,” said Sidney Baker, principal of Buckhead’s Sarah Smith Elementary School since 2000. “What some people saw [was] the racial makeup.” Many consider Buckhead the center of Atlanta’s white business and civic community. The city school system overall is predominantly black, reflecting the city’s demographics. Yet both are diversifying.

North Atlanta had magnet programs that drew students from all over the city, including for international studies and for the performing arts. Ten years ago, 69 percent of the student body was black and 20 percent was white. In October, after the system remade the magnet programs into “small learning communities,” the percentage of black students stood at 59. White students made up 17 of the student body and Latino students made up another 17 percent.

But there were other factors that fed into parents’ perceptions. North Atlanta was no athletics powerhouse, in large part because students went there for reasons other than its sports teams. And despite the prestige and awards earned by both the school’s magnet programs, parents felt the school’s academic prowess did not seem as strong as that of nearby private schools, some of which are nationally recognized.

“All through elementary school we thought, ‘That’s what you do,’ ” send a child to private school once he or she reached sixth grade, Livaditis said.

According to Baker, early in her tenure, Hall told each of her principals to find a reform model to implement at their schools. Most of the schools in Buckhead, already recognized as achievers, did not need basic learning reforms. Instead, they needed something “above and beyond” what they already had, Baker said.

That “above and beyond” became a years-long effort for all of Buckhead’s schools — not just the high school — to earn International Baccalaureate accreditation. With that process complete, the public school cluster is one of only a handful in the nation to offer the International Baccalaureate curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Often called by its initials, IB is a rigorous academic program that challenges students to become global learners and humanitarians. Accreditation can take years, as staff align their lessons to the program’s requirements and demonstrate their effectiveness through student work. The program’s primary and middle years programs — which stretch into 10th grade — culminate in a two-year diploma program that is recognized by colleges and universities around the world.

Schools in the cluster now hold seminars for parents to explain how IB works and what it means. At the same time, both administrators and parents like Livaditis and Ryan have learned to sell their experience through word of mouth and community outreach. They aim their message at elementary schools that have already been achieving high scores on state tests.

As IB programs have expanded, their prestige has caused elementary school enrollment in the Buckhead cluster to swell. Several of those schools have had to open annexes to expand their capacity. This has caused a bottleneck at Buckhead’s sole middle school. And because of this, officials anticipate a surge into the new high school. At Sutton Middle, Principal Audrey Sofianos expected 973 students this year. She got 1,050. She projects more than 1,100 next year, 1,340 students by 2012 and so on. Where Sutton used to get as little as 20 percent of an elementary school’s rising sixth-graders, it now averages 75 percent. It sent 95 percent of its eighth-graders on to North Atlanta last year.

To handle the overflow, Sutton’s baseball field will be filled by five mobile classrooms next school year. The tennis courts next to them will become a parking lot — at least temporarily, until the new high school opens. If all goes according to plan, that will be 2013.

“As you improve the image, you increase the enrollment. This improves the schools,” said Sam Massell, former Atlanta mayor and president of the Buckhead Coalition. “It’s a win-win arrangement.”