After all, what's one less high school?

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By MARLENE SOKOL

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 9, 2000

LUTZ -- I remember, like it was yesterday, the day the good people of Lutz started rallying against a high school at Hanna and Debuel roads.

"A high school?" I hooted. "They're fighting a high school?" It was unthinkable. A prison or a toxic waste dump, maybe. But who could find fault with a high school?

Little did I dream we'd go on to publish hundreds of stories chronicling dozens of site proposals that would meet with opposition from hundreds (maybe thousands) of homeowners in Hounds Run, Calusa Trace and Lutz's core center.

"Please slow this process down and help to select a site that is well suited to our community's needs," wrote Ronald Stoy, a parent who asserted that his son "absolutely loves" double sessions at the perenially overcrowded Gaither High School. Stoy went on to become vice president of the Lutz Civic Association, a dormant group that sprang to life, in part, because of the high school siting controversy.

"I don't think they've looked hard enough," Hounds Run's Denise Lasher said of school officials on numerous occasions. "They haven't done enough studies on the other sites to eliminate them from consideration."

Lutz's citizens insisted they had nothing against a high school per se. They just didn't like any of the places where school administrators wanted to build, especially when it was in their own neighborhood.

"If we don't let them know we do want the high school, the high school is going somewhere else," parent Janet Kaufmann warned.

But the message, in the media and as characterized by school officials, more often sounded like this directive from homeowner John McClain:

"You get on the telephone and you write letters till your hand hurts."

Reporter Bill Coats, who knows more about this issue than anyone on the planet, has tried many times to explain the issues to me.

It's not just traffic, or a knee-jerk resistance to sewer lines, or fantasies about Lutz being some big Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings tableau.

He says Lutz might have accepted a high school on U.S. 41, the town's natural hub. But real estate was expensive there, and it was too hard to put together a big enough piece of land.

Away from U.S. 41, where Lutz is less congested, growth management came into play. These areas were deemed rural, making it hard and perhaps illegal to build something as big and intense as a regional high school.

Maybe Bill is right. Maybe I just don't get Lutz because my values are different. I have said, and will say again, that I would welcome a high school right in my front yard. Bring it on.

Either way, we're left with some disturbing facts:

1. Nearly four years after voters were hoodwinked into a higher sales tax to build a football stadium, with a few crumbs put aside for schools, there is no high school in Lutz and none on the horizon.

You're right: I don't live in Lutz.

But I do live in the Northwest Hillsborough area served by Sickles, Gaither, Chamberlain and Leto high schools. An absence of a high school in one area contributes to crowding in the others. As my mother used to say at the dinner table, it all ends up in the same place.

2. Double sessions, a consequence of crowding, have become a fact of life. People try to put a pretty face on it, as it is unseemly to complain about your high school, ever. But a 12:30 dismissal is a 12:30 dismissal. As a taxpayer and working mother, I don't have to like it.

3. The latest plan, which the School Board endorsed Tuesday night over the lone objection of mother-of-three Connie Schmitt, is to take money that would have gone to a Lutz high school and use some of it to expand existing high schools, including Wharton, Sickles and Gaither. The extra classroom space might, for example, take Gaither off double sessions. But what we're really talking about, even when they throw around terms like "academy" and the really stupid one, "student stations," is bigger schools.

That runs counter to the thinking of educational experts, who are calling for smaller schools to foster a sense of community and prevent school violence. Groups like the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland are saying that high schools should be built for 400 to 800 students, not 2,400 to 2,600.

To be fair, Lutz's leaders did say they'd welcome a small community high school.

But things don't happen that way in Hillsborough County. Instead, they use our money to pay lawyers and real estate consultants, and send their top brass to four years of contentious community meetings and end up with . . .?

Nothing.

It's sad to see Lutz's high school money officially surrendered. No one wins, and even I'm not cynical enough to think people in Calusa Trace and Hounds Run and old Lutz are emerging victorious. Schmitt, for one, lamented that Lutz is now at less than "ground zero."

I'm sure there are some older people in Lutz who don't have kids in the schools and care only about peace and quiet under the live oaks.

But there also must be parents who fear, as I do, the prospect of shipping teenagers off to a place that sits on a highway and warehouses thousands more teenagers. I mean it's not like when we were in high school, and parents worried about drugs. Today, they worry about much worse. We should be focusing on how we can provide the best, most productive, most attentive environments during these vulnerable and sometimes volatile years.

Maybe next time a high school is considered, if there is a next time, this is what people will get worked up about in Lutz.

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