CSD Begins To Look Beyond College Heights for Early Childhood Learning
Decatur Metro | August 6, 2015 | 10:56 am
It’s no secret that City Schools of Decatur is in a race to keep up with its ever growing enrollment. As of the first day of school, enrollment is already at 98% of the aggressive projection.
It’s also pretty well-known at this point that CSD is under contract for a piece of property near East Decatur Station to potentially build a new, lower grade school. They’ve been floating the idea of a combined K-3 and 4/5 Academy to accommodate that growth.
But while Decatur High and Renfroe Middle schools are already undergoing large expansions, there still isn’t enough K-3 space. And after reopening Westchester Elementary last year as a K-3, CSD is now turning its sights on the one remaining historic elementary school in the city limits for a potential return to its original use.
As the Superintendent notes in her letter to the School Board for their August meeting, College Heights was previously an elementary school and its location between two “very busy and high enrollment schools”, Oakhurst and Winnona Park, make it an obvious candidate for conversion to a K-3.
So, if the School Board decides to turn College Heights back to a K-3 and also maintain the Early Childhood Learning Center in Decatur, they will have to find a new location for the ECLC.
On the agenda for the August 11th School Board meeting is an item to draw up architectural drawings to include the Center at Columbia Ventures’ mixed-use Avondale MARTA Station redevelopment. As the Superintendent notes, plans must be drawn up now so that “CSD’s project to be included in Columbia Ventures financing application, it must have design development architectural drawings produced for inclusion in the financing package.”
Nothing is imminent as the entire process could take 3-4 years, according to Superintendent Edwards, and is complicated by the fact that “The loan to the fund that developed [College Heights] as an ECLC would need to be paid off before it can be repurposed into an elementary school.”
So it sounds like much of this is a ways off, but this is perhaps a hint at just one more moving piece in the marathon race to keep up with rising enrollment. The Superintendent says that there will be Listening Session on the potential of a new ECLC in the near future, so keep an eye out for that in the coming months.
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April 23, 2015 Learn More About the Avondale MARTA Mixed Use Development Tonight! (6)
Turning College Heights back to a K-3 makes a lot of sense. Oakhurst needs a second elementary school badly. This would help the situation at Winnona too.
Does anyone know when the Avondale parking lot development project will start?
I like the idea of having a childcare center by MARTA.
NO! Everyone knows criminals use MARTA to get in and out of good neighborhoods and this will just make it too tempting for them to steal our little ones!
It is my understanding that College Heights does some great work with early identification and intervention for children with special needs that continues to reap benefits as they progress to elementary school. So while the building seems like a no-brainer for a crowding fix, much could also be lost if it closes without being replaced with a new facility.
I was always in favor of the ECLC concept. If anything, it should have done even more early identification and intervention. My understanding is that our special needs population of everything from profound intellectual deficits to behavioral disorders to autism spectrum to ADD/ADHD to dyslexia to dysgraphia is mushrooming, even among gifted children, no surprise given the growth in general enrollment. And given the attention being given in the media to the inadequacy of DeKalb County’s Special Ed Services, CSD should be sure that it is proactive and responsive right from the beginning of learning, before deficits widen.
However, using foundation funding that was contingent on the huge condition that that the building couldn’t be repurposed for X amount of years seemed worrisome right from the beginning. Anyone know what number of years was in the contingency? My memory is that it had a 2 in it. 12 years? 20 years?