Schools

Springdale Park Parents: Expand Our School

SPARK parents want to add more classrooms on campus

It’s no secret that parents are concerned about the overcrowding in Atlanta Public Schools.

But parents from Springdale Park Elementary School crafted a clear and united message to the board of education during a community meeting Thursday night: expand Springdale Park and keep the community together.

Expanding the school “gives us the chance to continue the momentum of the community we’ve started to build,” Nicole Foerschler Horn, a Springdale Park parent and Virginia-Highland resident said.

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Foerschler Horn and other members of the Springdale Park PTA urged parents to endorse option one on the survey distributed last week that allows residents to give feedback to the demographers hired by Atlanta Public Schools to fix the capacity issues throughout the district.

She reminded parents to select option one, which keeps the Springdale Park community together, and add comments about adding more classrooms to the campus to address the overcrowding issues.

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Atlanta Public Schools board member Cecily Harsch-Kinnane said classrooms could be added on the Briarcliff Road portion of the property, which is currently a parking lot.

“The lot on Briarcliff was bought for parking with the realization that this was a growing school,” she said Thursday night.

Money for construction would come from the school sales tax. Springdale Park was included in the list of 27 schools that are eligible to get money for construction and renovation from the tax.

Projects are funded based on a priority list, and Harsch-Kinnane said she believes the Springdale Park expansion would be a priority because of the capacity issues in this area of the district.

Springdale Park Elementary, which houses students from Virginia-Highland, Poncey-Highland, Midtown and Druid Hills, has 544 students enrolled this year. Enrollment is expected to peak at 756 students in about seven years.

The school was built for 450 students, but administrators increased the capacity to 550 students by adding more students to each class, Foerschler Horn said.

The group of roughly 100 residents voiced concerns Thursday night about redistricting options that would combine Springdale Park with Hope Elementary School in Old Fourth Ward to form primary centers at each school. One campus would house kindergarten through second grade and the other campus would house third through fifth grade classes.

Parents said this option keeps kids from walking to school because Hope is too far to walk to and creates transportation nightmares for parents with kids at different schools.

Other parents voiced concerns that Hope, a Title I school on Boulevard, is a low-performing school and wanted to avoid student test scores declining.

Hope met the federal benchmark last school year for test scores — known as Adequate Yearly Progress — in math and English.

More than 70-percent of students met or exceeded the goal in math and just over 86-percent met or exceeded the goal in English.

At Springdale Park, more than 97 percent of students met or exceeded the goal in math and more than 99 percent of students met or exceeded the goal in English.

Another option on the table was to move Poncey-Highland kids back to Mary-Lin, but Harsch-Kinnane said that scenario has basically been taken off the table.

Poncey-Highland was zoned for until Springdale Park opened in 2009, and she said redistricting that neighborhood again so soon would be unlikely.

Parents are also from the and Grady High School cluster because the neighborhoods see themselves as a unit, but no plan was formed Thursday night to address this issue.

Follow city-wide APS Redistricting coverage on Facebook. Read more about redistricting on the VaHi Patch Atlanta Public Schools Redistricting Page and VaHiPatch twitter.

Which redistricting option is your family endorsing? Tell us in the comments!


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