Parents question Duval Schools’ process for closing schools

Ortega Elementary will close. There seems little question about that now, regardless of parents’ concerns.

On Wednesday, the School Board will vote whether to approve district officials’ request to add Ortega’s iconic building to Duval Schools’ list of surplus properties — a necessary first step toward selling it. 

Adding a building to the surplus list means certifying that it’s no longer needed for educational purposes.

Duval Schools says the School Board authorized Ortega’s closure seven years ago. Parents say the district isn’t following its own rules for closing schools and the move caught them by surprise.

“All of us are quite irritated by this whole process because it is not transparent — it’s not been well communicated,” Alex Stone, whose children attend Ortega, said at a community meeting last week.

The debate about Ortega Elementary’s future highlights broader concerns throughout the district about how the district invites community feedback for these kinds of high-impact decisions. District officials have said many times over the last two years that closing schools is necessary because of financial constraints and will help the district operate more efficiently.

In recent months, the district’s planning documents have turned to listing a line-item for a “budget for closures” instead of specifying which schools it plans to close each year — a vast difference from the specific list of recommended closures that caught public attention in 2024.

Two years ago, a consultant developed a list of about 30 schools they said the district should consider closing. Ortega and several nearby schools were on that list. 

Amid a backdrop of community panic over the specter of closing schools, Chris Bernier became superintendent. He reassured stakeholders that the list was a draft and did not represent an actual decision.

In October 2024, Bernier released a new facilities planning document, which he said was not a commitment to close schools. When he asked the board to vote on his new capital plan, he said explicitly the board would be voting only on “direction” for the building plan.

“They are not voting tonight on school closures and consolidations. While those ideas are in the plan, those ideas require further engagement and further board action,” Bernier said in 2024. “The requirements of board policy 8.51, 8.53 and 5.44 are very clear to this superintendent. In order to consolidate or close a school, there is a three-prong process.”

That process, he said, requires gathering community feedback, holding a public hearing and having a board vote — none of which has happened for Ortega yet.

The board did later vote to close half a dozen schools that fall and voted last year to close two more — though it’s adjusting the timing of several closures — giving each school its own vote.

Old Ortega

Nestled into the Old Ortega Historic District, Ortega Elementary was constructed in 1923 in the Mediterranean Revival style.

The district says it wants to put the century-old building on the market as soon as possible because of its historic value. They say they want to find the right buyer for the building that current board Chair Charlotte Joyce once said she’d sooner lie down in front of the door than allow to be torn down.

Typically, closed school buildings make their way to the surplus list months or years after a school is shuttered. District officials say putting Ortega on the surplus list now allows them to put it on the market and take their time finding a buyer. 

“We fully understand the historic nature of this school, this community,” Duval Schools operations chief Jim Culbert told Ortega parents last week. “We want to have as long a period of time as we can to vet out a buyer that’s going to do what is in the best interest of the community.”

Ortega students will consolidate into a rebuilt Venetia Elementary when it opens in 2028, district officials say, as outlined in a seven-year-old facilities planning document called The Bold Plan. The School Board in 2019 voted to approve then-Superintendent Diana Greene’s master facility plan. 

The district says that vote was the approval it needed to close Ortega.

“The official Board action to close Ortega Elementary and consolidate it into a new Venetia Elementary occurred in 2019 as part of the adoption of the district’s facilities plan,” District Spokesperson Laureen Ricks wrote in an email to Jacksonville Today. 

Ricks said that vote “established the framework for several future school consolidations tied to new school construction projects” — the first example of which was the consolidation of Henry F. Kite and Martin Luther King Jr. elementaries into the new Rutledge H. Pearson Elementary when it opened in August 2023.

After gathering the requisite community feedback, the board held public hearings and voted Nov. 2, 2021, to consolidate Henry F. Kite and to consolidate Martin Luther King Jr. elementaries with the planned Rutledge H. Pearson. Construction began the following year, and the new school opened in 2023. 

The old Martin Luther King Jr. building was declared surplus last year. The district still owns the Henry F. Kite building and now uses it for its Bridge to Success program.

Questioning the process

Duval Schools has closed (or begun the process to close) about two dozen schools in the last decade. 

School Board policy — 8.53: Closing and Consolidation Impact Review Process, specifically — says the district must involve the community in decisions to close and consolidate schools. And, documents from the early days of The Bold Plan’s implementation seem to suggest that the district intended to use the “three-pronged approach” Bernier referenced.

Ortega’s parents say that’s their issue: The agenda item to surplus the building was their first hint that Ortega’s closure is imminent. 

Stone, the parent from the meeting at Ortega, tells Jacksonville Today he feels the district has not been honest with the community about its process.

“Maybe it does need to be closed. Maybe it doesn’t make sense anymore. 
Fine — we’re okay with that, but show us the data that shows that,” Stone says. “Now we’re building a 1,200-student school, and we only know about half of the students that are going into there, and we’re going to do the process after we build it? That’s absurd.”

The district has already started the project to rebuild Venetia Elementary, and construction is scheduled to begin in January. It will have 1,200 student stations — something the district says makes it a cost-efficient build, but critics counter is far bigger than the district’s own preferred size for elementary schools. 

At a board workshop earlier this month, board members asked Bernier about the plan for Ortega and Venetia. 

“Venetia will be built at a number that’s appropriate for the size of an elementary school to be financially profitable,” Bernier said. He then declined to discuss what other schools might be affected.

Community meeting

Last week, Ortega’s community convened a rare summer meeting of its School Advisory Committee. The meeting — held at the school at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday — drew a couple dozen parents and community members mostly in opposition to the planned closure. 

Parents listened to Duval Schools operations chief Culbert and schools chief Corey Wright explain the district’s plan to raze the existing Venetia Elementary and build a massive replacement, the plans for which they said were originally from a school in Polk County.

The district chose Venetia to be rebuilt because the parcel of land it sits on is larger than the land available at Ortega. There’s a community park behind Venetia right now, but officials weren’t sure what would happen to it.

Ortega’s enrollment fell below 300 this year. 

Parents at the meeting said the size of the new school is intimidating; if filled to capacity, it will be four times the size of Ortega. Culbert and Wright argued that a large school affords more programs and resources.

Standing in Ortega’s auditorium, Wright flashed a map on the screen and told parents Ortega has just five students from its own neighborhood. 

That’s because its attendance zone isn’t contiguous — so most of its students actually live south of Venetia Elementary. About 40% of its Ortega students are not zoned for it but choose to be there through Duval Schools’ choice programs.

The combined current enrollment of both Ortega and Venetia would fill just half of the seats at the new school, though, and parents asked repeatedly where the rest of the new schools’ students will come from. 

Wright said other schools will be affected, but he would not elaborate.

A teacher at the meeting asked about rumors that Fishweir Elementary might close.

“We will pull together all the surrounding school communities and have that conversation later in the fall,” Wright said. “Fishweir will be part of that conversation, but I don’t know that Fishweir will close yet. Stockton will be part of that conversation. There will be other schools pulled into that conversation to help inform that decision.”