Almost 1,000 students will switch schools
Some Seminole County parents are furious as the school district prepares to transfer nearly1,000 elementary students to different schools in August.
District leaders say the shuffling is necessary to relieve crowding and prepare for future growth. The district will rezone about 600 students to Longwood Elementary School, which is slated to reopen in August after being closed to students for six years. The rest are switching between existing campuses.
Treva Marshall and her neighbors penned a 20-page letter asking the district to allow their children to remain at Keeth Elementary School in Winter Springs, which has a long history of high test scores and parent involvement, instead of moving them to Layer Elementary School.
Marshall and her neighbors cited a list of reasons why they should stay, including their proximity to Keeth, differences between the two schools’ start times and their involvement on Keeth’s Parent Teacher Association and school advisory council.
She said she doesn’t understand why her children will have to move to a school more than a mile farther away from their home while others are allowed to stay. She thinks district leaders selected her neighborhood to switch schools because they wanted more higher-income families at Layer. The district said that’s not the case.
“I feel that what they are proposing is unfair,” Marshall said. “I feel that our communities are being targeted — that there were selected communities that are being targeted.”
After reviewing several rezoning plans, board members have settled tentatively on one and will have public hearings on Tuesday and Jan. 24. Board members could make a decision as soon as Jan. 24.
It would affect students from six crowded elementary schools: Highlands, Keeth, Lake Mary, Layer, Winter Springs and Woodlands.
Marshall’s neighbor, Ann Russolese, said she too is disappointed in the proposal. She and Marshall say the two schools aren’t comparable, though both have re- ceived mostly A grades in recent years. Keeth received a B for the 2015-2016 school year, while Layer got a C.
The idea that their children would attend Keeth was a “gigantic factor” when Russolese and her family decided to buy a home in Winter Springs in 2012. Now, she’s worried about how the zoning change will affect her home’s value.
“We chose a smaller house for more money to be zoned to Keeth,” she said.
The district considers a variety of factors, including race, family income and students’ distance from campus, when shifting students, said Joseph Ranaldi, executive director of operations for Seminole schools.
Board member Karen Almond said she’s been contacted by about 40 parents about the rezoning, and she understands families want- ing their children to stay at the same schools. But she said the board has to balance the needs of the whole county and can’t make exceptions for specific neighborhoods.
To accommodate growing student numbers, the school district said last summer that it would reopen Longwood Elementary School with an $8 million makeover. Seminole has about 29,403 students in kindergarten through fifth grade this year, up1,687 from five years ago, according to the Florida Department of Education.
Some students who live in the affected areas won’t have to switch schools, including rising fifth graders, siblings of rising fifth graders and students with certain disabilities. Ranaldi said he expects 830 to 980 students to be moved.
Winter Springs Mayor Charles Lacey said about 20 Keeth parents have contacted him.
“They are invested through their children, which is a trigger for all sorts of emotions ... and they have an investment in the local school for some number of years, and now they’re going to have to go to a different school,” Lacey said.
For many parents, their frustration is punctuated by the feeling that Longwood should have remained open all along. Parents, students and employees protested in 2011when the board decided it had to shutter Longwood as “a last resort” to save an estimated $1.1 million annually in the wake of the Great Recession.
Asked about the board’s decision to close the school, Almond said it seemed like the best use of the district’s dollars at the time. If the district had the money today, she said, it would open a brand new campus instead.
“I don’t know that it was a mistake per se, but until you do it, you don’t know what the impact was on the community,” Almond said. “Two of us were newer school board members at the time. I wish we would’ve had more time under our belt when we made that decision.”