Proposals for reorganizing Columbus schools include closures, conversions

A major reorganization of Columbus City high schools is included in dozens of proposals that a school facilities task force continued reviewing Monday as it moved closer to a vote on what to recommend.

For more than two hours, the group of about 20 community members chewed over the details conceived by the district’s administration under Acting Superintendent John Stanford, working toward a vote Aug. 30. A series of community meetings would follow before final recommendations go to the school board in October.

That administrative plan envisions various scenarios, including:

■ Closing Marion-Franklin High School on the South Side, which is 53 percent full, reassigning its students to South High School and converting it into a middle school in a large feeder-pattern reorganization that pulls sixth-graders out of elementary schools and into a middle-school experience. Buckeye Middle School would close.

■ Converting Linden-McKinley STEM Academy, a Linden facility currently made up of students in grades seven through 12, into a sixth-through-eighthgrade middle school, transferring its high-school students to East High. Mifflin Middle School would close, with its students shifted into Medina Middle School.

■ Moving Columbus Alternative High School into the former North High School site in Clintonville, while shifting the Columbus North International High School into the former Brookhaven High School site, which it would share with Columbus Global Academy.

■ Alternatively, relocating the overcrowded Dominion Middle School in Clintonville, which is at 114 percent of capacity, into the former North High School campus, with International going to Brookhaven.

■ Two options include closing Siebert Elementary on the South Side. There are other options that call for adjusting the boundaries of five other elementaries — Highland, West Broad, North Linden, Westgate and Maize.

The administration’s recommendations don’t include any timelines for school closures and consolidations.

The locations of community meetings will be determined by the mix of draft recommendations approved by a vote of the task force Aug. 30, and final recommendations may change based on those meetings before going to the school board in October, said district spokesman Scott Varner.

The task force debated Monday how it would decide: Should it take a series of votes on the various alternatives, or one vote on a recommendation from Stanford? Co-chairman Jim Negron supported just one vote on a complete recommendation, but others disagreed.

“I think that’s absolutely wrong,” said member Stephen Hardwick, supporting votes on the various alternatives.

Co-chairwoman Pari Sabety agreed with Hardwick, noting that some of the options are exclusive to each other in that by choosing one, it eliminates others.

The panel also received Stanford’s recommendations on potential administrative-site changes, many driven by the district’s recently completed purchase of the massive former ECOT administrative site on the South Side. The district won the former online charter schools headquarters at a cost of about $3.5 million at auction in June — in the middle of the task force’s effort to consolidate support sites such as offices and bus depots.

Under consideration are the closing and sale of bus depots on Morse Road, estimated to be worth $5.83 million, and another at the Downtown Fort Hayes campus, which would clear the way for a long-planned arts elementary school to feed into middle and high schools located on the campus.