Savannah school district offers alternative facility, rezoning plan. Here's what it entails

Alternatives for the Savannah-Chatham County Public School System facilities plan have been drafted and proposed to the public. These plans will dictate a slew of potential changes for students, including rezoning.

SCCPSS Superintendent Denise Watts and other district leaders presented Tuesday to parents and community members at West Chatham Middle School in Pooler. School board representatives Michael Johnson, Tonia Howard-Hall and School Board President Roger Moss were also in attendance.

“While the communication and the engagement tonight is around facilities, at the heart it is about your children,” Watts said to the District 7 Town Hall crowd on Wednesday Dec. 12 during the Facilities Planning Update for Phase I.

The alternative proposals mostly discussed shifting school attendance zones that had been laid out in the initial plan. The schools discussed were Gould Elementary School, Rice Creek K-8, New Hampstead K-8, West Chatham Middle School, New Hampstead High School, Groves High School and Beach High School.

SCCPSS student rezoning challenges: With no vote taken on facilities plan, Savannah-Chatham superintendent back to drawing board

Multi-school complex could drop elementary school

Adjustments to the facilities plan come after the Dec. 6 board meeting where West Chatham families spoke before the board about their dissatisfaction with initial student rezoning plans. The board ultimately decided to take no action on the plan. That decision forced Watts to draft the alternatives.

Watts started the Town Hall by saying, “While there were some references in the last school board meeting to us looking at students as numbers and widgets, let me assure you that that is not the case.” She did reiterate, however, that the district’s challenges remain the same and require action:

• School Capacity Levels (over- and underutilization)

• Facility Conditions/Life Cycle

• Extended Time on the Bus

• Population Growth/Shifts

• English speakers of other languages (ESOL) Resource Efficiency

The key criteria that SCCPSS assessed to draft the alternatives were student movement, instructional implications, building utilization and safety/culture. One potential change to the original facilities plan shared was reimagining the multi-site K-12 complex (formally referred to as the Groves-Mercer-Gould Complex) as a 6-12 facility. Leaders acknowledged that doing so could require additional costs to retrofit the complex, which would factor into district finances and likely Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (ESPLOST) fund allocations.

More: Savannah-Chatham Schools' superintendent releases 100-day report. What are the takeaways?

Community input to impact district’s next steps

After the alternate proposals were shared, parents and community members split up into discussion groups. They were given about 20 minutes to highlight any challenges, solutions and key takeaways before sharing them with the larger group. Some of the same themes from the school board meeting reemerged:

• Families’ confusion over athletic eligibility if students should switch high schools

• Negative perceptions of Groves and Beach high schools’ quality of education as expressed by parents of students at New Hampstead

• Concern about rezoning’s impact on students’ social groups and academic progress

Parents also asked for more transparency from SCCPSS about what Phase 2 of the long-range plan might entail. They advocated for a clear five-plus year plan to avoid the need to shift school zones again in the next two to three years.

Others asked about the status of a potential high school project for Pooler. Ball-Oliver said, “That's something that's on the table. It's out there for discussion but that is further down the line.” She indicated that a Pooler high school project would be five to ten years out at this point.

SCCPSS representatives had families write down their takeaways on notecards that they planned to review over the coming days and weeks. Moss cited Watts’s 100-day report and how she noted the need to plan ahead. He said, “Our board is committed to that need to plan. Every business I know does a five year, so we will get there because, I agree, I don't like doing this piecemeal. None of us want to do this every two years.”

He assured that the board would work with the district to devise a five-year plan, but that Phase I of the facilities plan is meant to address immediate needs before the 2024-25 academic year begins in August.

Watts told the crowd, "We want your input and we want to continue to keep you engaged so that we can come to the best possible solution.”

Watts and her team will deliver yet another version of the facilities plan to the board on Wednesday Jan. 10, 2024.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah schools facilities plan gets alternate options