FAYETTEVILLE — The Fayetteville School Board is expected to decide on a configuration plan for middle-level education at its meeting Thursday. The plan would take effect in 2015 when freshmen move to the high school.
The administration’s recommendation is to make all elementary schools kindergarten through fourth grade, turn Holt and McNair into schools for grades five and six, have Owl Creek serve pre-K through sixth grade, and reconfigure Ramay and Woodland to grades seven and eight.
Not everyone is happy with the plan. Some parents have argued for creating schools for grades five through eight, thus minimizing the number of building transitions students must make during their time in the school system.
Implementing such a configuration would be enormously expensive compared to the administration’s plan.
The School District hosted five public meetings earlier this month to gather feedback on the issue. Fewer than 80 people showed up for the meetings.
Such low attendance could be blamed in part on the fact school is out and some families are on vacation. But if the majority of residents disagreed with the administration’s plan, we would have expected a far higher turnout at the meetings. With the exception of one pocket of resistance, there’s no great desire to go in a radically different direction than the administration proposes.
By now, board members surely have most if not all the information they need to make a decision. They all attended at least one of the public meetings, and some attended all of them. They deserve credit for that.
The larger issue of attendance zones looms. That will be settled once reconfiguration is decided.
Opinion, Pages 5 on 06/27/2012