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Large crowd expected at North school zone meeting
KINGSPORT — The Sullivan North High School community Tuesday night has the chance to speak out about proposals to close Cedar Grove Elementary School and shift students around to other schools in the North district. The Sullivan County Board of Education, Director of Schools Jack Barnes and Central Office staff are to meet with the community from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in the Little Theater of North. “I will be disappointed if there’s not a very large crowd,” North Principal Richard Carroll said Monday, predicting the meeting may have to move from the 400-seat Little Theater to the gym because of turnout. He predicted many students will attend because of discussion last week about the idea of making North a K-8 school, closing all other North zone schools, and moving high schoolers to South and Central high schools. “Our school was absolutely in turmoil,” Carroll said of the K-8 comments by County Commissioner Sam Jones of Colonial Heights, which mirrored a 2004 proposal supported by BOE member Jack Bales of Sullivan Gardens, also in the South zone. Asked about Jones’ comments and the idea of Kingsport buying North for a freshman academy, Carroll said he hears speculation about Kingsport being interested in buying South High School and taking over its feeder schools if annexation in the Colonial Heights area continues after the 2010 moratorium ends. Kingsport City Manager John Campbell said Kingsport is not actively involved in the discussion regarding North High School. “It’s important at some point in time for the city school board and county school board to get together and try not to overlap or duplicate,” Campbell said. “I don’t know if they’re really formally talking about it. I think it’s important, as a Sullivan County taxpayer, that they try and get together and work out what they can, if there is some common ground.” The North meeting follows a Jan. 30 meeting at Cedar Grove Elementary. The school board is to vote March 2 on a group of proposed changes including whether to close Cedar Grove and set off a chain reaction that would shift its kindergarten through third-graders to Kingsley and Brookside elementary schools and move all three schools’ fourth-graders to the 5-7 Ketron Intermediate School. The board also is to decide whether to move the seventh-graders from Ketron to North or leave North an 8-12 school. Dee Williams, president of the Cedar Grove PTA, said seventh-graders have no business at North because of the chance of commingling with older students. But she said Cedar Grove parents had hoped the full board and Central Office staff would come to Cedar Grove like they came to other schools proposed for closure. “Jack Barnes refuses to come to our school. He says there isn’t enough time,” Williams said Monday. “We could have scheduled a meeting at our school like the others.” Barnes and BOE Chairman Ron Smith said North was chosen because of the large crowd expected. The Jan. 30 meeting at Cedar Grove, organized by the PTA, drew about 250 people, including North zone BOE members Jim Kiss of Bloomingdale and Dan Wells of Lynn Garden, and Larry Hall, a county commissioner and the school system’s human resources director. Williams said because of the time constraints of Tuesday night’s meeting and because it seeks input from all the North zone schools, a PowerPoint on Cedar Grove couldn’t be presented in its entirety. “We do not want the focus just on our school,” Williams said. The school board also is looking at closing Akard Elementary just west of Bristol and Valley Pike Elementary just east of Bristol, as well as rezoning more than 120 students from overcrowded Colonial Heights Middle School to underutilized Sullivan Middle School in the South High zone. Middle schoolers from Mary Hughes Elementary and Middle School were proposed to be split between Bluff City and Holston middle schools, but that appears to be a moot point since the Mary Hughes administration has agreed to quit using four modular units there, and the BOE voted Feb. 12 to remove all modular units from Mary Hughes.
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I'm sorry Mrs West I didn't know you knew me personally and that this does not affect me. My bad.
No, I am not just talking about gas. I'm talking about the extra distance the kids will be having to drive. Instead of a 5-10 minute drive down the road to North, they'll have a 15-30 minute drive to another place.
I love how people who aren't directly affected by whats going on, seem to think they know whats best.
Mrs West, are you trying to tell me that gas will equal the cost of electricity, maintenance, staff, etc..? The cost would drop by at least 60%. I know these kids don't want to move to another school, but, it is a need. I was part of the sophomore class that moved from Lynn View to North, Ketron was our biggest rival, there was few problems, and you know what? I gain a bunch of close new friends.
I am so disappointed in the Sullivan County BOE. Are they not even thinking about the children. My son is in the fourth grade at Cedar Grove and there are twenty kids in his class to one teacher, if they close the school and move these children to Kingsley or Brookside just think how many children will be in each class. What kind of education could these kids get that way? There would be no way that a teacher could help an individual child that falls behind. Also, what about school rivalries? If you move kids from North to Central and South you are just asking for trouble. Think of the kids when you are making these decisions, they are important and school is hard enough as it is.
Mr. Davis, you obviously do not have children at North who are spending their days worrying about where they are going to go to school next year. The kids at North want to graduate with the kids they have grown up with. If you change North to k-8 it will need major remodeling in order to make it suitable to smaller kids. It will also give the high school kids a very long bus ride or have them driving a longer distance. While trying to save money in one place, they will be spending more in gas to bus the kids further away. If kids that attend DB want to go to North, all they have to do is file a out of zone request, that is what I do and have done for the last 4 years. I live in the city and choose to send my children to county schools because of the smaller population.
Kingsport is responsible for annexing areas into the Dobyns Bennett school district and causing North to lose too many students. Just so that DB's student population will remain high and to protect DB's best interests just like Kingsport always does. As a result of this now DB is trying to handle it's excessive student population while North High School struggles to stay open. They should send some of those student back to North from DB. So that the student per teacher ratio at both schools will make sense.
I think North as a K-8 is an excellent ideal. The cost factor of keeping all the elementary and middle schools open does not add up. North's population has dropped to a point where it makes no sense to keep it as a high school. I graduated from North and there was around 1500 students, what is it now, 700? I know, no kid wants to change schools, but, with the school systems what they are now days it only makes sense.
Just leave North alone. These families have had enough uprooting with all the schools that have closed in recent years. Why make their teenage years more stressful then they are?