"For months the RAS school board was telling the citizens that we couldn’t sell Pilgram Lane or Olson Elementary Schools because we may have to use them to house students while renovating Northport and Lakeview Elementary schools. Since the district decided to pass a “back door referendum” taking away our right to vote on tax hikes to renovate Northport and Lakeview, there is now no reason to keep Pilgram Lane and Olson. What is the divestiture committee doing right now? They have been meeting for a year and the only action has been the proposed sale of Hosterman Middle School to District 287. Why don’t we have For Sale Signs at Pilgram Lane and Olson? What is the hold up? After the facilities study, the district seemed enthusiastic about selling our surplus property, but now our guess is that the District 281 will make every excuse they can on why they SHOULDN’T sell the land. If we sell these properties we can perhaps off set some of the costs of Northport and Lakeview. We welcome your thoughts."RAS Facility Divestiture Site
One thing I would add. Is it really necessary to house the District 287 programs in Sandburg for 2 years? Since we are still in an economic downturn and I see space for rent almost everywhere I go... Wouldn't it be better if 287 rented some of that short term excess capacity? Then RAS could finish their program consolidation now and get out of the Landlord business...
With the current plan, RAS will be in the Cavanagh and the Winnetka Learning centers for 2+ more years... This is one slow divestiture. Could you imagine a for profit business taking ~4 years to spin off excess property? I can not.
G2A Jan Facility Notes
6 comments:
I think they need to hold onto PLE. The Wold report was very flawed. This part of Plymouth is in fact growing which will cause an overflow problem at Sonnesyn and Zachary. Five houses in this neighborhood sold in the last 3 months. All the houses have school age children moving in. As the housing market turns around, more houses are going up for sale. Retirees are moving out and families are moving in. RAS held onto Sunny Hollow after it closed years ago and had to reopen it. They need to hold onto PLE and rent it out for now. Or do we want to deal with extreme overcrowding within the next 2-3 years?
Remember the recent data though from Dennis and the long term trends. See the bottom of this posting for the RAS detailed analysis. G2A Vanishing Kids
I don't see any signs of a near term turn around based on the data. The only potential growth would be if RAS opened another Magnet. Which comes with as many negatives as positives. A charter would probably be better and less expensive. Though it wouldn't help cover the RAS overhead.
The cold reality from my perspective is that our community demographics continue to scare off too many families. Hopefully this will change.
People are buying houses again in this district, but let me be more specific. They're buying homes within the ZLE boundaries. ZLE has a very good reputation. The data that you referred to covers the district as a whole, not individual neighborhoods. ZLE is already somewhat crowded. What might it look like in a few years?
Just a reminder, ZLE is crowded due to intra-district transfer students. 100+ of the ~640 students would typically attend a different RAS elementary school.
This is a district/parent choice. If the student enrollment within the ZLE boundary increases, the intradistrict transfer students would be turned down. Then they would need to go back to their community school, IDT to another RAS school or go elsewhere.
Many are from the Sonnesyn area, and some are from Forest / Meadow Lake... That is why drop off/pick up became so crazy this year.
Here is the enrollment data from Oct09, though it does not break out the intradistrict transfer details.
RAS Oct09 Enrollment data
The school max capacity student numbers from the Wold study were:
Forest 609
Lakeview 504
Meadow Lake 771
Neill 714
Noble 504
Northport 663
Sonnesyn 798
Sunny Hollow/RSI 828
Zachary Lane 636
You'll note only Forest and ZLE are maxxed. The others have quite a bit of room.
I do wonder what choice the IDT parent's would make if ZLE was no longer available due to an increase in the number of community students?
No problem in our neighborhood though, more kids seem to be graduating than entering. And many families with young kids are moving west to get into a different district before their kids get too attached.
Agreed on the enrollment numbers. They aren't going to go up enough in the near term (or even mid-term) to justify holding onto PLE. Remember, that is a building sitting on nearly 16 Million in needed renovations right now. That number will simply continue to climb (and it's I believe its now at the point of the renovation vs new building cost that the Dept of Ed wouldn't even approve the remodel).
As for John's second question. I don't know how many are actually inter-district transferring out of Forest. I could find out but my guess is it's single digit at most. Forest is at 648 today (note that is 39 kids over capacity) and other than RSI makes it the largest elementary in the district. Pretty sure no-one ever saw that one happening. :-)
As for the question, my guess is ZLE closed the doors to interdistrict-transfer they would go to SEE.
DJ
From what I understand, Forest loses some students and gains others through the various transfer programs. That makes good sense given their excellent results with a very diverse student body.
We have a few great families and friends that IDT from there to ZLE for their own personal reasons.
Post a Comment