TREZEVANT VS. WHO FOR THE 2A 2016 TITLE

[TheTruthPrevails]

REMATCH... Good for Marion Co. they made it back... Too bad it's to Face Trezevant

To be the best you have to beat the best, right?

[BlackHavenSenator]

To be the best you have to beat the best, right?

 

The Best will show themselves Saturday morning, no doubt. 

[TheTruthPrevails]

The Best will show themselves Saturday morning, no doubt.

agree totally.....

[kwc]

Hopson pitches school consolidation plan to board

 

Jennifer Pignolet , jennifer.pignolet@commercialappeal.com 

9:41 p.m. CST November 29, 2016

• Hopson elaborates on plan to close seven schools, build three new ones

• Families from Knight Road Elementary rally to save their school

 

When parents at Knight Road Elementary learned their school could close, Marisol Perez said many of them came to her desperate for a way to stop the plan.

As a bilingual mentor at the school, she works with the students and their families in the predominantly Latino school population.

 

"I see how passionate they are about the school," Perez said.

She shares that passion, not just as an employee but as a parent. Her 9-year-old daughter, Jazlyn, is in the third grade at the school.

 

So she and the other staff members rallied families for a showing of support at the Shelby County Board of Education work session Tuesday night when the plan to close their school, along with six others, was on the agenda. About 50 members of the school community, including parents and dozens of young children, sat in the audience for more than two hours holding signs that read in both Spanish and English, "We love our elementary school."

 

"They want to fight for our school," Perez said. "They don't want our school to close."

Superintendent Dorsey Hopson presented his plan to the full board for the first time Tuesday, although most board members had heard the details in a work session earlier this month.

 

The plan would close seven schools and consolidate them, some into brand-new schools that would be built over a period of three years.

 

Knight Road would close and be folded into Goodlett Elementary, which would receive a new building. And that's a detail, Hopson said after the meeting, he thinks is being lost in the conversation.

 

"I think we’ve got to do a good job of educating this community about what’s happening," he said. He noted that elementary school closures tend to have less push-back from the community than closing high schools, where students graduated and often feel a stronger tie.

 

But Knight Road has "just such a tremendous support from their community" because of the high Latino population, Hopson said.

 

Closing next year would be Dunbar and Carnes elementary schools, rezoning Dunbar students to Bethel Grove and Cherokee and Carnes students into Downtown and Bruce.

 

The following year, the district would close Charjean and Magnolia elementary schools and build a new school at Alcy Elementary that students from all three schools would attend. Knight Road also would close that year and merge into the new Goodlett Elementary.

 

A plan to turn Woodstock Middle into a K-12 school with a new building has been pushed back a year to the 2019-20 school year, Hopson said, to give the district more time to make sure that's the right model for that community. The school would serve students from Lucy and Northaven elementary schools, which would both close. Some students would be zoned away from Bolton and Trezevant high schools to attend the new K-12 school.

 

Hopson's timeline includes a first vote next week that would initiate meetings with the various communities and authorize him to ask the Shelby County Commission for funding for the two new buildings that would open in 2018-19. The second required vote to close the schools could come in January after the community meetings.

 

Some board members voiced concerns Tuesday about rushing the closure decisions. Hopson said there's no need for that, but the request to the county commissioners needs to be done as soon as possible.

 

Board member Miska Clay-Bibbs said the question she's been asked most frequently is why one school campus was chosen over another for either closure or a new school.

 

Hopson said factors for consolidation included enrollment and school performance, but the poor quality of each of the facilities to be torn down was glaring.

"These are some of the worst buildings we have," he said.

Edited November 30, 2016 by kwc

[kwc]

Trezevant may very well drop from a projected 3A school in the future and become a 2A school again. 

 

The above PSA was just FYI, now back to your regularly scheduled program.