School Board Chair Darryl Willie and member Charlotte Joyce listen as a community member advocates to keep her neighborhood school open. | Megan Mallicoat, Jacksonville Today
Published on November 5, 2024 at 12:25 am
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At a meeting that stretched until midnight Monday before Election Day, the Duval County School Board held a series of votes of its own. The result: six elementary schools will close — but only half at the end of the current school year as originally proposed.
The proposed closure of the Young Men’s and Women’s Leadership Academy middle school magnet program at Butler Middle was pulled from the agenda Monday morning.
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The district is working to correct a major budget shortfall, and it says closing schools that are drastically under-enrolled is a straightforward way to cut the bottom line without affecting personnel. But the board worried that the community has not had enough time for input. The need to close schools isn’t new, but the list of which schools Duval Schools proposed to close was finalized just one month ago. The affected schools spent the month of October holding a flurry of meetings about the proposed consolidations.
For one, the board decided that the consolidation of Don Brewer and Merrill Road elementaries will have to wait. Outgoing District 1 representative Kelly Coker successfully advocated for the pause to better address logistical concerns raised by the Arlington schools’ neighborhood residents.
“I have a lot of community in Arlington who need answers,” Coker said.
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She said she recognizes the financial situation the district is in — it needs to cut more than $100 million from its budget for the coming school year — but she believed the plan to consolidate Don Brewer and Merrill Road was poorly planned. As a solution, she proposed consolidating the two schools a year down the road, and potentially folding Merrill Road into Don Brewer instead.
Several board members agreed with Coker’s concerns — particularly about traffic around the Merrill Road campus. District 3 representative Cindy Pearson said she spent time driving around Jacksonville after last week’s public hearing on the closures so she could see for herself the concerns she heard from community members.
“My takeaway from it was similar,” Pearson said. “We need to keep moving, but we need more time to be thoughtful.”
The board approved similar delays for the closures of G.W. Carver Elementary in Northwest Jacksonville and Hidden Oaks on the Westside.
Closing the schools saves between $500,000 and $1.5 million per school for the upcoming school year, according to the district — figures that were not compelling enough to convince Board Chair Darryl Willie.
“The math doesn’t math,” Willie said. He voted against three of the closures.
Annie R. Morgan on the Westside, Kings Trail in San Jose, and Susie E. Tolbert in Northwest Jacksonville will close at the end of the current school year and consolidate with neighboring schools that have room for their students.
A major community concern about the closures has been transportation, because a majority of children zoned for the closing schools walk to school. On Monday, Superintendent Christopher Bernier reiterated that the district will provide transportation for students whose new school is more than 1.5 miles from their home. In some cases — as in for Annie R. Morgan’s students — the district may establish a bus stop at the site of the closed school so that students can walk to their old school and be bused to their new school.
Bernier has said many times in recent months that to be fiscally efficient, schools must have at least 700 students. On Monday, he said that larger elementary schools also create opportunities for new programs that smaller schools can’t sustain.
“Increasing enrollment will create additional opportunities for all of our kids,” Bernier said.
The closures are part of Duval Schools’ new five-year capital plan. A district spokesperson said next year’s closure discussion will start significantly earlier — perhaps as early as early spring 2025. The schools already on the schedule to consider for closure/consolidation next year include:
- Hyde Grove Elementary K-2 into Hyde Park Elementary
- Long Branch Elementary into R.L. Brown Elementary
- Anchor Academy into either Mayport Elementary or Atlantic Beach Elementary
- Joseph Stilwell Middle into Ed White, which would become a 6-12 grade school
