Out of the negotiations come a new school in the Mandolin subdivision and a way to complete a large passive park.
By JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK, Times Staff Writer
Published December 4, 2005
KEYSTONE - School district and county officials have worked out the kinks in a deal that would allow a new school to rise in the Mandolin subdivision, where Citrus Park Drive dead-ends off Countryway Drive.
The land swap, which also would complete a giant passive park spanning from N Mobley Road to Citrus Park Drive, had been threatened by legal entanglements. But negotiations have eliminated the problems, paving the way for the school district to move ahead with its construction plans early in 2006.
A new 960-student school would be on schedule to open no later than August 2007, facilities director Cathy Valdes said.
Along with a second new elementary school, slated to rise on the Walker Middle School campus on N Mobley Road, the northwest corner of the county would gain close to 2,000 new seats to help control crowding at several area schools, most notably Bryant Elementary and McKitrick Elementary.
Fawn Ridge parents are not waiting for the school district to create attendance zone boundaries for these schools to begin lobbying on behalf of their children.
Several turned out last week ostensibly to assess conceptual designs for the Walker campus elementary school, but really to corner the "boundary guy," as they called him: Steve Ayers, the man who draws school attendance zones when new schools open.
They had a simple message: Leave us alone.
Since their subdivision was built in the mid 1980s, children living there have been assigned to Citrus Park, Lowry, Westchase and now Bryant elementary schools. When parents have fought to give their kids some stability, they've usually lost out to other interests, such as keeping the Westchase community intact.
"We're like the little redheaded stepchild that keeps getting moved farther out," said Kelly Cook, who has a son in fourth grade at Bryant and 4-year-old twin girls who will begin kindergarten in 2007. "At some point it's like, can Fawn Ridge please be left out of the scenario?"
Ayers told the parents that the Mandolin school likely will be theirs. It's not as close as the property the school district is trading to the county, which sits within Fawn Ridge, he admitted. But it's close enough.
If that's true, some moms said, they're pleased to get a campus nearer to home. They're not interested in interim moves before the school opens, though.
"I want it done once," Mary Vaughan said. "I don't want to have to move twice."
Their big concern is that Fawn Ridge is the neighborhood farthest from Bryant, which superintendent MaryEllen Elia has deemed the school district's most pressing crowding problem and promised to find a solution for 2006-07. Parents fear that newer but closer neighborhoods might get to stay put while the Fawn Ridge kids bear the brunt of the solution.
"We've done it enough," said Annette Doyle, who has a third-grader at Bryant. "It's somebody else's turn."
The neighbors haven't yet organized themselves: So far, they've just engaged in bus stop chit-chat.
"But we all have some firm ideas of what we don't want to have happen," said Doyle, a veteran of three other boundary rezonings that went against her community. "Every time a new community gets built out in our area, instead of having them move to a new school, it always ends up being our neighborhood. We cannot have that happen again."
