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Schools

Parents get peek at plans for new buildings

By BILL COATS
Published February 23, 2007

Charlie Gloss, a network engineer with two children at Hunter's Green Elementary School, leaned over an aerial photo of the school.

Artwork showed where a new building of 12 classrooms would fill an area now used for overflow parking.

After asking a few questions, Gloss, 47, was pleased.

"I think it's great," he said. "I think it's needed."

Gloss' reaction Monday night during a meeting at Wharton High School was typical of the reactions found at five such meetings that local government officials had held about adding classroom wings at many public schools, said David Borisenko, who heads planning and school siting for the Hillsborough County school district.

"The parents mostly are happy that we're building additions," Borisenko said. "There were a few people who don't think we're doing enough."

Atypical at the Wharton meeting was the turnout of only five parents. Borisenko said the meetings have averaged about a dozen. The building boom has been driven not by crowding but by a 2002 amendment limiting class sizes in Florida public schools. By next year, the maximum class sizes will be:

-18 students in kindergarten through third grade.

-22 in fourth grade through eighth grade.

-25 in high school classes.

Given state funding, the Hillsborough school system plans to break ground by this August on $229-million in new classroom wings, which are to open in August 2008.

Monday night, none of the five parents who attended the Wharton meeting filled out comment forms. Two expressed qualms.

Ross Simon of Arbor Greene said a guard should be hired to keep children away from the construction site at Pride Elementary and keep construction workers away from the children.

"The school right now doesn't meet our standards on security," said Simon, 36, who has a first-grader and a kindergartener at Pride, plus two younger daughters in line for it.

Paula McDonald, with two daughters at Hunter's Green, came to the Wharton meeting worried about school size.

In late 2005, the McDonald family moved to New Tampa from Sterling, Va., where their school averaged 100 children per grade, McDonald said. Hunter's Green has about 880 students. "I think everything is big down here. This high school was gargantuan," she said.

Bill Coats can be reached at (813) 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com.

[Last modified February 22, 2007, 08:02:49]