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Plan to even enrollment nearly done
By JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK, Times Staff Writer
BROOKSVILLE -- School Board officials are putting the finishing touches on what they believe to be the best plan to ease crowding at the county's public elementary schools. Next, they want to hear from you. "You don't just draw a line and say it's over," said board chairman John Druzbick. "We will have public meetings: one on the east side, one on the west side." The goal, superintendent Wendy Tellone has said frequently, is to be certain that no parents with concerns about the proposal think that their voices were not heard and considered fairly. "This way, the public can't say we kept them out of the process," board member Robert Wiggins said. "If anybody has a better way of doing it, we'd be glad to hear it." The district plans to send written information about the plan to parents by the end of April. Public meetings are set tentatively for 6 p.m. May 1 at Springstead Theatre and 6 p.m. May 7 at the Hernando High School Performing Arts Center. The board is scheduled to formalize the new attendance zones on May 20. It also is set to talk about the issue during its workshop at 3 p.m. Tuesday. "We want to let parents know before the end of the school year so they can prepare for next school year," district planning director Heather Martin said, noting that kindergarten registration begins in May. "We want them to register at the school they're going to be rezoned to." Driving the changes is a concern that some elementary schools, especially J.D. Floyd and Pine Grove, have too many students for their size while others, primarily Moton and Eastside, have enrollments well below capacity. Board members have said they hope to stave off the need for even more immediate new construction by reallocating students to seats available in the district. They want to make the changes as soon as possible because another shuffle is likely to occur when a new school opens, perhaps as early as August 2005. Families should not feel as though their children have attended a different school each year, board members have insisted. District staff members have created new attendance zones that attempt to send all children from a neighborhood to the same school. Staff members spent much of the past month mapping out the location of each elementary school student in order to have the most accurate count of children who would go to each campus. Only Deltona and Westside elementary schools would escape boundary changes under the plan before the board. All others would see some ebb and flow of children -- including the magnet program at Chocachatti Elementary, which accepts students by lottery. More than 70 children living along the eastern edges of the Brooksville Elementary zone, for instance, would be transferred to Eastside Elementary. The families living in Masaryktown that now send their children to Suncoast or J.D. Floyd elementary schools would switch to Moton Elementary. The projected end result is that no elementary school would have more than 850 students or fewer than 715. This year, enrollment at J.D. Floyd and Pine Grove hovers around 1,000 students each, while Eastside and Moton have fewer than 700. Most county elementary schools are built for about 750 to 800 students. "Having over 1,000 in one and under 700 in another is not equitable," Wiggins said. He acknowledged that the board was unlikely to make wholesale changes to the map proposed by the administration, if for no other reason than that the details were worked out for efficiency and not politics. He also said he recognized that the final decision would not make everyone happy. Still, he said, the district must realign the attendance zones. "It's something that is necessary," Wiggins said. "It's a necessary evil." -- Jeffrey S. Solochek covers education in Hernando County and can be reached at 754-6115. Send e-mail to solochek@sptimes.com
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