Members of Battle Ground Public Schools' overcrowding committee analyze building floorplans in the library at Maple Grove K-8 School.
Battle Ground teachers, parents and community members are leaving no stone unturned when it comes to discussing boundary changes for the 2019-2020 school year.
Throughout October, a 30-member advisory committee has toured the district’s newest, oldest and most overcrowded primary and middle schools to develop three to five recommendations and present them to the school board during the Monday, Nov. 5 meeting.
“One of the first questions I asked when I walked through the door was, ‘what is off the table? Is there anything we can’t consider?’ And (Deputy Superintendent) Denny (Waters’) immediate answer was anything’s on the table at this point,” said Alyssa Hoyt, a parent with five children in the district.
“Obviously, we can’t build a new school. That would be an optimal solution, but that’s just not an option at this time because the voters have chosen not to pass a bond or a levy. Splitting the school district came up, but we decided this would not be a short-term solution feasible by next fall,” she added.
The committee includes Director of Facilities and Operations Kevin Jolma, Director of Student Services Tom Adams, Deputy Superintendent Denny Waters and Communications Manager Rita Sanders. There are six principals providing perspectives and resources about their schools as well as a combination of six teachers, secretaries, and aids. Rounding out the group is a mix of 14 parents and community members living in the district.
Sanders and Waters did a lot of advertising to find members for the committee. They were thrilled that over 50 people applied for the task. They invited southern end of the district board members Tina Lambert and Mavis Nichols to draw 30 names out of a hat. The schools on the south end are suffering the most from overcrowding.
“We separated the names into different categories because we wanted a broad representation,” Waters said. “We wanted to have people from the Laurin area, Glenwood area and Pleasant Valley area because that’s where the most overcrowded schools are. We wanted to have people representing the middle of the school district because, potentially, that’s where some students might be relocated and it might impact those schools.”
Touring different schools in the district has been one of the committee members’ primary tasks.
“Our first meeting was at Laurin and then our second meeting was a Tukes. So members got to see the difference between the Laurin campus, which was built in the early 70s, and then the Tukes campus, which is our newest school,” Waters said.
Recently, the group visited Glenwood Heights Primary — the oldest and most overcrowded school in the district. It was built in 1956 with a capacity for 484 students. Currently, the school has 809 students. Sanders said 26 portable classrooms surround the school now. Hoyt learned the issue goes deeper than just overcrowded classrooms.
“The problem is not that there are too many kids in the classroom, the problem is that there are too many kids on the campus,” she described. “What we’re trying to address as a committee is how can we reduce the number of kids on the campus? Not just adding portables to create more classrooms because that’s actually making the problem worse.”
Transitional time between classes has become another concern at these schools with so many portables.
“There are groups of students who are going to literacy specialists and going to English Language Learning specialists and going to math specialists. It takes them 10 minutes of transition time to go from their classroom to their special groups and then come back,” Hoyt said. “Over the course of a whole year, if you calculate that out, that is 30 hours of instruction time that they are losing just because they’re out in portables and they’re not close to where they need to be. That’s a problem that really needs to be solved. We are not serving our kids in the most need just because of the design of the campus.”
