Conservatory high school plans scrapped
District staff will help students relocate after finishing ninth grade.
The School District’s ongoing spat with the state over the need to relieve school crowding by building new schools and adding on to others has seen its first casualty: The Conservatory at North Palm Beach’s plans to grow into a high school like no other in the county.
Weeks after welcoming the school’s first freshman class, Principal Teresa Stoupas told parents in a letter Friday that the district will halt the extension of the A-rated elementary and middle school to grade 12.
“We are of course tremendously saddened by the news, as we had expected to be able to serve your children through their senior year and graduation,” Stoupas wrote.
Instead, the nearly 40 students will finish out ninth grade at Conservatory and then “every effort will be made to ensure that he or she will be able to secure a seat at a high school of their preference for their sophomore year,” Stoupas wrote.
Those efforts will include allowing students to work directly with district staff to be placed in the schools of their choice, end-running any lottery system or other hurdles that may be in the way, Superintendent Donald Fennoy told The Palm Beach Post on Monday afternoon.
“Our choice team will deal with them individually and make it happen. They have my permis-
sion to do that,” Fennoy said.
The move short-circuits the vision so many parents clamored for — a high school with a music focus and an edgy way to teach subjects that turned the traditional classroom on its head.
But the high school’s future was bumping up against a new reality, which requires the district to be very strategic about where and when it adds capacity to a school, Fennoy said.
“It is sad, and I’m empathetic to the families and principal who worked so hard,” Fennoy said. “But at the end of the day, I have to make the best decision for all of the district.”
A high school at The Conservatory was approved by the previous administration. But while the programming went through, the plans to create the necessary space for incoming students over the next three years appear less concrete, and therein lies the problem.
The district must either build an addition, add concrete portables (neither of which are mentioned in the five-year capital plan) or claim and repurpose another district property. All of these options create more seats for high school. And this summer, the district discovered that the state is holding its building plans to a high level of seat-scrutiny.
A request to build a new elementary, middle and high school have lingered without state approval for months as both sides dicker about crowding in some schools and empty seats at others.
While the district’s 23 traditional high schools are at or near full, Fennoy says the district must be more calibrated in its planning of where any additional high school seats will go. In this way, The Conservatory’s fate is not directly related to the bid to build a new high school further south, but it is part of the larger conversation.
“I have to be careful before this gets so large it impacts our ability to get other projects done,” Fennoy said.
Most families, however, were focused on an impact closer to home.
“It’s destroyed our world,” said Victoria Knott, whose daughter, Elizabeth, sought a seat at The Conservatory after graduating from Bak Middle School of the Arts.
Elizabeth quickly clicked at the school, which employs what is known in education circles as “project-based learning” — where lessons in multiple subjects are built around projects. The model emphasizes problem-solving, collaboration and learning through doing and researching rather than, for example, lectures.
“By the second day, she came home skipping and jumping. She’s learning more. She’s much more involved in her academics than she ever was. And she loves the quartet she’s in,” Knott said.
Upon hearing the news, her daughter was in tears, and Knott was among many upset parents who were promised a high school.
“This was something they said was a done deal,” Knott said.
Some parents said their children had turned down spots in other popular choice programs including, for example, Suncoast High or Dreyfoos School of the Arts.
The Conservatory’s would-be class of 2022 came from neighborhoods zoned for schools from Lake Worth to Jupiter and west to the Glades.
Elizabeth Knott and four of her classmates live in West Palm Beach in a neighborhood zoned for Forest Hill High — the most crowded school in the district with 2,480 students on a campus built for fewer than 1,840.
District officials have said the most immediate crisis is high school crowding.
Of the county’s 23 traditional high schools — serving grades nine through 12, only four are under 90 percent full and two of those are in the distant Glades region. None is within a half-hour drive of The Conservatory.
The school drew the biggest group of freshmen — 12 of them — from Palm Beach Gardens High, which last month was 96 percent full. But more students are expected even this year, and district officials estimate the school will be 99 percent full sometime this year or next and overflow by fall of 2020.
The Conservatory started out as a neighborhood elementary in the late 1950s. But by the 2000s, the school was shrinking. “In 2010, we had under 400 kids and I couldn’t get the kid across the street to come to school here,” Stoupas later recalled. What caught parents’ interest was a plan to emphasize music and take the school through the eighth grade — that plan was realized beginning in 2014. The middle school was open to students outside the boundaries through audition.
In the past couple of years, the school began to consider where its first middle school graduates would go. Eventually, then-Superintendent Robert Avossa agreed they wouldn’t have to go anywhere and that instead, the school would grow with them.
The principal and staff were won over by the approach taken by a vaunted school in California, San Diego’s High Tech High.
Fennoy says he believes in the concept and wants to make it happen. He also wants buy-in from the School Board, whose members have said they want to be consulted when the district considers significant programming changes to a school, such as adding more grade levels.
“We have to make sure we’re fully prepared to accommodate them,” Fennoy said. “But we can’t accommodate on that site. The question for us is, ‘If not there, where?’ We need time to figure it out.”