Lack of leadership keeps underused school buildings open
The failure, once again, to make a decision about closing half-empty buildings highlights the lack of leadership by the Columbus Board of Education.
The same lack of leadership has left the district without a permanent superintendent more than 15 months after the last one announced he was going to leave.
With a state report-card grade of F and the prospect of a state takeover if the district can’t improve to a D in the next two years, it’s a deficit Ohio’s largest school district can’t afford.
After asking a group of 19 community members to spend more than seven months meeting, studying data and listening to the larger community to come up with building-use recommendations, the board on Wednesday essentially ignored all but the easiest ones.
One couldn’t blame the 2018 Facilities Task Force for being a tad annoyed; on the other hand, the volunteers shouldn’t have expected much different as the board did essentially the same thing after a similar process two years ago.
Presented with eight carefully considered recommendations, the board lumped them Wednesday night into a single multipart resolution and took an up-or-down vote. With a 5-0 vote, it agreed to adjust elementary-school boundaries on the north and west sides to even out enrollment and to make plans to relocate some administrative offices and study the feasibility of moving others.
Board members voted to “take no action” on recommendations that would have involved closing or consolidating schools. The most controversial was to close Linden-McKinley STEM Academy as a high school and transfer those students to East High. The Linden-McKinley building would have been used for several middle-school programs and Mifflin Middle School would have been closed.
While ending the highschool program is justified by the fact that threequarters of the students assigned to LindenMcKinley choose to go elsewhere, it is complicated by the city’s recent announcement of the One Linden plan, aimed at revitalizing a long-struggling area. It’s unfortunate that city and school district leaders didn’t work together on a common approach.
Board members also punted on moving Dominion Middle into the former North High School building and adding several programs to it, as well as a complex realignment of South Side schools that would have included closing Siebert Elementary.
The district has too few students in too many buildings. This isn’t a matter only of wasting money; it hurts programs, especially at the high-school level, when there aren’t enough students to justify certain classes or to field strong extracurricular programs.
Naturally, no community wants to see its school closed, and people protested the recommendations vigorously and movingly — as has been the case with every school-closing proposal everywhere. That’s why school boards put together panels of community members and experts to take on the task: so they have recommendations they can defend as impartial and based on data.
If board members are waiting for a buildingclosing plan that doesn’t make anyone unhappy, Columbus will never close any buildings.
And while that may avoid some short-term heartache, it robs the district of resources that should be spent supporting robust, successful programs, rather than propping up those with anemic enrollment and little public buy-in.