Hoover school rezoning proposal would affect 2,500 students next year

The Hoover school rezoning proposal presented by Superintendent Kathy Murphy tonight would send an estimated 2,516 students, or 18 percent of the kids in the district, to different school zones next year, Murphy said.

The superintendent presented the proposal to hundreds of parents in a citywide meeting at Metropolitan Church of God and would like to implement it in the 2016-17 school year, she said.

First, she wants to give parents time to provide feedback before taking a final proposal to the Hoover school board for a vote in a month and then to the federal court for approval, tentatively in April.

Here are some key aspects of the proposal:

• School zone lines would change, attempting to zone students to schools closer to where they live and to better comply with a federal desegregation court order. Parents can find out what schools their children would attend by plugging their address into a school locator program at hooverrezoning.com. Maps showing proposed school zones lines also are available there, as well as more information presented to the public tonight.
• South Shades Crest Elementary School would change from a K-4 school to a K-2 school, and Brock’s Gap Intermediate School, now with grades 5-6, would begin to serve students in grades 3-5 in the South Shades Crest Elementary School zone only.
• Trace Crossings and Deer Valley elementary schools, now serving grades K-4, would return as K-5 schools.
• Bumpus Middle School, now serving grades 7-8, would switch to a 6-8 school
• High school feeder patterns would not change. Bumpus and Simmons middle school students would continue going to Hoover High, and Berry Middle School students would continue going to Spain Park High.
• Trace Crossings Elementary students would split up between Bumpus and Simmons middle schools but all return to Hoover High together.

Grandfathering

• All students currently in grades 8-11 would be “grandfathered” to attend the high school to which they are currently zoned.
• Students currently in the fourth or seventh grades would have the option to be “grandfathered” to stay at their current school for their fifth-grade or eighth-grade years. However, parents of these students would have to provide their own transportation.

The rezoning changes are designed to better utilize space in existing schools and make room for growth in the western part of the city, Murphy said.

“We have some schools underutilized, and we have some schools that are pushing capacity. They’re a bit strained and stressed,” Murphy said.

The new rezoning proposal doesn’t fix all the problems, but it should help alleviate many concerns and keep school officials from having to rezone again in a couple of years, she said.

However, Hoover High School is at 90 percent capacity, and school officials realize they will have to make a decision about whether to add a third high school or seek some other alternative at the high school level, Murphy said.

The proposal also seeks to ensure school communities have contiguous boundaries so that groups of students in a particular apartment complex or neighborhood are not plucked from their community to attend a school far away, Murphy said.

Federal desegregation court order

It also is designed to better meet goals of a 1971 federal desegregation court order that seeks to make sure minority students are treated fairly and given the same educational opportunities as majority students.

“We are a melting pot of a community,” Murphy said. “We have lots of nationalities and different races. We should respect and value that diversity.”

School system leaders consulted with the U.S. Department of Justice and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which is a party to the pending federal lawsuit, in developing the proposal, Murphy said.

However, neither the Department of Justice nor NAACP Legal Defense Fund is forcing anything on Hoover, she said. “Nobody developed this plan for us. Nobody crafted this plan for us,” she said.

The proposal also should help provide some efficiencies in school bus transportation, Murphy said.

About 8 percent more children, or 1,137 additional students, would be eligible for transportation under the proposal, she said. More bus routes may be needed, but many routes would be traveling fewer miles because some students’ schools will be closer to their homes, she said.

The state rule that prevents the state from funding transportation for students who live within two miles of their school still would be in effect, but Hoover school officials still could seek exemptions from that rule in cases where student safety would be compromised, Murphy said.

Murphy emphasized that her proposal is not a final document. She is truly interested in getting community feedback and suggestions for tweaking the plan, she said. However, “this is not going to be dropped in the trash, not to be given consideration,” she said. She doesn’t plan to start all over again, she said.

The public, after digesting her proposal, is encouraged to fill out a survey at hooverrezoning.com and also to ask questions and provide feedback at four more community meetings planned between now and Feb. 23. Here is the schedule for those meetings:

• Feb. 11, 6-8 p.m., Brock’s Gap Intermediate School, 1730 Lake Cyrus Club Drive (for families from Brock’s Gap Intermediate and Deer Valley Elementary)
• Feb. 16, 6-8 p.m., Hunter Street Baptist Church, 2600 John Hawkins Parkway (for families from Hoover High, Bumpus Middle and Trace Crossings and South Shades Crest elementary schools)
• Feb. 18, 6-8 p.m., Green Valley Baptist Church, 1815 Patton Chapel Road (for families from Simmons Middle School and Gwin, Green Valley and Bluff Park elementary schools)
• Feb. 23, 6-8 p.m., Spain Park High School, 4700 Jaguar Drive (for families from Spain Park High, Berry Middle and Riverchase, Rocky Ridge, Greystone and Shades Mountain elementary schools)

If designated dates and times conflict with families’ schedules, people are welcome to attend any meeting that bests fits their schedule, school officials said.

Murphy then hopes to present a final plan to the school board around March 7 and file a motion for approval with the federal court around March 14. The tentative date for a court hearing is April 7-8, she said.

Initial reactions

Parents had mixed reactions to the plan tonight.

Several parents from South Shades Crest Elementary School said they were disappointed to see their school grade configuration being changed.

Bennett Bowman is slated to be South Shades Crest’s PTO president next year, but the proposal would move her to Brock’s Gap Intermediate School. She said she still needs time to digest the proposal as a whole but is trying to understand why South Shades Crest is being treated differently than other elementary schools.

Shannon Trotter, the South Shades Crest PTO’s first vice president and fundraising chairwoman, said a lot of their board officers would be split up under the current proposal and she is concerned that her school would at least initially have fewer parents around to help with fundraising due to a smaller school population.

Lori Westhoven, another South Shades Crest parent, said she would be concerned if she were a Trace Crossings Elementary parent because students who finish there would be split up to go to Bumpus and Simmons middle schools. That could potentially pull friends away from one another at a very key developmental age, she said.

Cathy Lamb, a parent of students at Bluff Park, Simmons Middle and Hoover High, said everyone is eager to learn if they will have to switch schools and be split up from friends.

She was encouraged to see that Murphy and other school officials listened to parents’ concerns as they drew up the plan, she said.

“It made me feel better,” she said. “In some of the (earlier) meetings, we kind of felt like she was giving us lip service.”

However, to be fair, Murphy did not yet have a plan put together at the earlier meetings, she said.

In particular, she and other parents were relieved to see that, as a whole, students from the Simmons zone would not be sent to Spain Park High School instead of Hoover, she said.

“I don’t think you could have found a single parent (from Simmons) who wanted to send their kids to Spain Park,” she said.

Rob Beckman, a parent of students at Green Valley Elementary, Simmons Middle and Hoover High, said from what he can tell thus far, his children won’t be impacted by the rezoning. He likes the idea of making South Shades Crest a K-2 school and Brock’s Gap a school for grades 3-5.

“I think that’s an excellent idea that alleviates a lot of stress in that area,” he said.

See more about the rezoning plan at hooverrezoning.com.

This story was updated at 10:16 p.m. with additional information and at 11 p.m. with videos.