COLUMBIA'S FUTURE ELEMENTARY ATTENDANCE AREAS

Source: Columbia Public Schools

Lora Wegman graphic

It’s too early to say whether Columbia’s proposed new high school will have a traditional, block or modified class schedule, whether students will have unassigned time during the school day or whether they will be allowed to leave campus during lunch.

Those decisions likely will be made once Columbia Public Schools knows exactly who will work at and attend the new school, Assistant Superintendent Wanda Brown said.

Columbia is in the early stages of planning for a third comprehensive high school off St. Charles Road in northeast Columbia. A $60 million bond issue approved last year will allow the district to open the first phase of the school to ninth-graders in the fall of 2010. When the school, being built in three phases, is completed, all of Columbia’s middle schools and junior highs will become 6-8 intermediate schools, and ninth grade will be added to Hickman and Rock Bridge high schools.

Hickman now operates on a traditional schedule with seven class periods, while Rock Bridge has a block schedule that offers 90-minute courses on alternating days. There are numerous variations of those two schedules that could be used at the new school, Brown said.

"That’s definitely something people who inhabit the building - principals, teachers and students - are going to have to decide, regarding what kind of schedule would work best to deliver curricula," she said. "That’s a huge part of what we do to build a sense of community, letting people who will inhabit the building make decisions about what type of environment would work best for them."

A series of public forums this month will start the process of deciding who will attend the new school. Instead of redrawing boundary lines, the redistricting committee is expected to cluster elementary schools together, allowing them to attend the same intermediate and high school, committee Chairman Don Ludwig said. Right now, all of Columbia’s elementary schools except Ridgeway, a magnet school, feed into assigned middle and junior high schools, but not high schools.

Two factors will be used to determine which elementary schools should be grouped with which intermediate and high schools: Proximity to the buildings and demographics. The goal is to have a similar percentage of low-income students at each of the three high schools, Ludwig said.

Doing so will require the district to group more affluent elementary schools such as Mill Creek with lower-income schools such as Benton. At the same time, Ludwig said, the committee must consider distance and travel times. "We’re not going to bus kids from Prathersville down to Rock Bridge High School," he said. "It’s not going to be easy to get to these goals."

One of the benefits of clustering elementary schools together rather than drawing separate boundary lines for the high schools, Ludwig said, is that it allows students to go to school together from kindergarten through graduation.

"Kids tend to make friends in elementary school, and holding them together is a value to children as they move through the system," he said.

Students aren’t supposed to transfer to another high school because of where their friends go, but Brown said she suspects friendships factor in when kids ask to attend the high school outside of their boundary areas.

About 70 students this year have transferred out of Rock Bridge into Hickman and about 60 living in Hickman boundaries have transferred to Rock Bridge, she said.

Ludwig said he expects community members to address not only attendance areas, but also school programming and transfer policies during the forums.

The meetings will begin at 7 p.m. in the media centers of schools on the following dates: Hickman High, Oct. 14; Rock Bridge High, Oct. 15; West Junior High, Oct. 21; Jefferson Junior High, Oct. 22; Oakland Junior High, Oct. 23; Smithton Middle, Oct 28; Gentry Middle, Oct. 29; and Lange Middle, Oct. 30.

The committee will bring a proposal back to the community during a second series of public forums in April, then a final recommendation will go to the Columbia Board of Education in May.

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