The School Board of Alachua County met on March 3

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At the March 3 School Board of Alachua County meeting, the board agreed to keep Duval open and moved forward with plans to convert Lincoln and Mebane to K-8 schools, although those changes would not be implemented this fall. Under the current maps, Stephen Foster Elementary is the only school that would close in the fall of 2026.

Public comment

During public comment, 17 people asked the board to keep all the schools open or at least pause the process; various speakers objected to the potential closures of Foster Elementary, Williams Elementary, Duval Pre-K, Rawlings Elementary, and the Alachua elementary schools. County Commission Chair Ken Cornell asked the board to pause the process and said school district staff will present the plan to the Gainesville City Commission and the County Commission at their joint meeting on March 9.

Member Tina Certain said she was “glad that the schedules aligned” so staff could go to the joint City/County meeting, “but in the elected officials’ meeting, we were hoping to have a robust discussion with our colleagues from the County and the City. It was a good meeting, but it wasn’t as robust as I would have hoped it had been.”

Chair Thomas Vu said, “Yes, I would prefer if some of our local elected officials actually attended our meeting and gave their thoughts to us directly in a publicly noticed meeting they were all invited to, instead of directly to the press, before picking up a phone and talking to us. That would have been very nice. It also would have been really great if the City of Gainesville bothered to RSVP a yes or no in attendance as well. I just want to make note that the Mayor of Gainesville also did not come to this meeting, where they could have expressed their opinions.”

Elementary schools

John Gilreath from JBPro presented the latest elementary maps, which reflected board members’ requests to make Mebane a K-8 (closing Irby and Alachua Elementary Schools); split Foster students between two schools instead of five (they will go to Rawlings and Metcalfe except for a small area north of NW 39th Avenue that will be zoned to Norton); relocate the Foster STEM magnet to Metcalfe or Rawlings; rezone the Longleaf neighborhood to Wiles; and rezone Fletcher’s Mill, Pine Hill Estates, Ridgemont, and South Pointe to Terwilliger. The new map also rezoned Pine Forest Estates, Bella Vista, and the area in the rectangle bounded by NW 39th Avenue, NW 23rd Avenue, NW 13th Street, and NW 6th Street to Rawlings. Pine Park and Gateway Park were moved to Metcalfe; The Gables, Reserve at Kanapaha, and Element at Celebration Pointe moved to Idylwild.

Concerns about a K-8 at Mebane for Alachua students

Member Sarah Rockwell was concerned with the cost of the construction needed to put the youngest elementary students at Mebane because they need sinks and bathrooms in each classroom. She suggested keeping K-3 or K-4 at Irby Elementary.

Superintendent Kamela Patton said there have been issues with state accountability at Oak View Middle School (currently 5th-8th grades) because you don’t have “the whole complement of the elementary.” She said they’re also trying to keep siblings together so parents don’t have to drop off and pick up students at multiple schools. But, she said, “anything can be done. It’s always about what works best for a family and keeping kids, as much as we can, together.”

Rockwell said, “I’m just trying to troubleshoot things that I’m hearing from the community… with concerns about — how are we going to have enough money to build all these buildings? How are we going to plan for the new construction in Alachua?” Rockwell also favored placing the STEM magnet at Metcalfe. 

Vu said he favored a single K-8 in Alachua and proposed giving the Alachua Elementary property to the City of Alachua as a sports or recreation area. 

Elementary school capacity with the requests from the February 26 workshop

Discussion about the other elementary schools

Certain said she would prefer to have STEM programs at Norton, Metcalfe, and Rawlings, “just offer the programming at each of the schools.” She said her position on the Alachua K-8 was that the district could add a new building at Mebane for the elementary students instead of redeveloping Alachua and Irby; she said the same logic applied to Williams Elementary and said the funding would come from the capital funds budget, not the General Fund. She also didn’t support any zoning changes that would result in schools that are over-capacity from the start, particularly Chiles, Wiles, and Idylwild, so she supported taking out the modifications that were requested by the board at the last workshop.

Gilreath said the number of zoning exemptions could be reduced at Chiles and Wiles: “That’s a policy decision.” Certain asked for information on which zoning exemptions could be pulled; some are “choice” exemptions in which students are grandfathered in until they finish fifth grade. 

Member Leanetta McNealy: “It bothers me to know that I’m right there in the midst of that community, and I’m not really being heard.”

Member Leanetta McNealy said she still opposed closing any schools and said the process has not considered student outcomes; she said she can see Williaims and Lincoln from her bedroom window, “and it bothers me to know that I’m right there in the midst of that community, and I’m not really being heard.” She said she is not in favor of “continuing with this on March 12,” and she wasn’t in favor of any of the maps: “We have got to find some other plausible solutions for allowing schools to remain where they are… We must stop… We need to put this in phases.”

Member Janine Plavac explained that Schools of Hope “is a law that was passed in ’25 that says that if a school is under 75% enrollment or has more than 400 seats, then charter schools can occupy our buildings, and then we are responsible for food, transportation, and cleaning the building… So this is a new thing, and this is what’s driving a lot of this right now, is bringing capacity up for our schools.” She said Alachua County’s birth rate hasn’t dropped significantly, so “we shouldn’t close five schools, because that does not address what the statistics show.” She said there are 10,000 students in Alachua County who are not enrolled in district schools, “and my fear is that we’re going to lose more if we do this.”

Plavac said she was upset about closing Williams, “this historic school… What’s going to happen to the community?… What we’re doing now is, we’re dividing the community more.” She asked why the Williams students couldn’t all go to Prairie View and suggested turning the Williams property into a community recreational facility with playgrounds and sports fields. She also supported keeping Duval and Rawlings open. 

Chair Thomas Vu on Williams Elementary: “Kids deserve to go to school on a place that isn’t a dump site… My position on that is not changing at all, and I would rather see them go into a new facility next door [at Lincoln],… and I would love to see Lincoln Middle School itself rebuilt.”

Vu said he would like to give the Williams property to the City of Gainesville or back to the Williams family. He said he became very emotional when he read that Williams was built on a dump site, “and I think it’s wrong to tell kids that they deserve to go to a school built on a dump… Kids deserve to go to school on a place that isn’t a dump site… My position on that is not changing at all, and I would rather see them go into a new facility next door [at Lincoln],… and I would love to see Lincoln Middle School itself rebuilt… I think there are ways to honor history while at the same time creating something new and better… I’m just thinking about these really dark parts of the history of that school, and I still remember the first time learning about it, I couldn’t stop reading, and I just laid in my bed and I cried about it because I had no idea I was living next door to something so terrible in terms of a history and the way in the past that the governments here have treated kids.”

Member Tina Certain: “We have too many schools open for the number of students that we have… Keeping all 22 elementary schools open would make everybody happy, but that is not financially feasible.”

Certain returned to the Schools of Hope topic and said charter schools can co-locate in existing schools “at district expense” without applying to the district. She also said that previous school boards have “kicked this can down the road” every time rezoning has come up, “and we’re at a place right now where, if we’re saying we want to be financially efficient and to really handle taxpayer resources in a responsible manner,… we would heed the recommendations [from FADSS (the Florida Association of District School Superintendents)] that we have too many schools open for the number of students that we have… Keeping all 22 elementary schools open would make everybody happy, but that is not financially feasible.” She said again that she didn’t support the recent changes to the maps because several schools would still be over capacity and said she preferred Draft C.

Vu said he thought most of the board supported Draft D because it keeps Rawlings open. Patton said she wanted to remind the board that “if we keep filling [schools] up and they’re not full, it’s defeating the purpose — we’re still spending all the operating dollars on the buildings.”

Member Sarah Rockwell: “Both Williams and Lincoln are desperately in need of redevelopment. Both of these schools are aging facilities, and our students deserve better,… and when we have two aging facilities that are under-enrolled, the way that we can provide the best facility… is to combine those facilities and build one excellent facility.”

Responding to a question from Rockwell, Gilreath said future growth is expected in the Meadowbrook, Terwilliger, and Wiles zones. Rockwell said it didn’t make sense to her to have Terwilliger at 75% capacity while Wiles is at 105% and Meadowbrook is at 77%. She said creating a K-8 at Lincoln made sense to her because “both Williams and Lincoln are desperately in need of redevelopment. Both of these schools are aging facilities, and our students deserve better,… and when we have two aging facilities that are under-enrolled, the way that we can provide the best facility… is to combine those facilities and build one excellent facility.”

Member Rockwell: “As much as the financial impact of Schools of Hope is a huge issue for the board, the logistical impact and what it would do to students — socially, educationally, emotionally — to have their campus shared like that, it is just not something that we can allow to happen in good faith. It would be absolutely terrible for our kids.”

Rockwell said she kept thinking about what it would be like to share a school campus “with another school that has different schedules, different behavior systems, different school culture, and how that would negatively impact students to an incredible degree. And as much as the financial impact of Schools of Hope is a huge issue for the board, the logistical impact and what it would do to students — socially, educationally, emotionally — to have their campus shared like that, it is just not something that we can allow to happen in good faith. It would be absolutely terrible for our kids.”

McNealy said she believes enrollment will decline even more “with what we are getting ready to do… Can’t we do better?… We have so many smart people in this very district who could certainly come up with… phases of what could be done.”

Member McNealy: “The dump… goes over the whole campus, not just Williams… We’re talking about rebuilding Lincoln, and it sits on the same land… I know from the evaluations that that campus is okay.”

McNealy told Vu that “the dump… goes over the whole campus, not just Williams… We’re talking about rebuilding Lincoln, and it sits on the same land… — dump is dump.” She said the property is evaluated every year, “and it always comes back that it’s fine… I know from the evaluations that that campus is okay… So I was surprised to hear you say and share that information with us tonight, because I was under the impression that that had been corrected,… I thought we had gotten that under control.” She said she would not support a K-8 for Williams at any point in the foreseeable future: “I’m asking you… and almost begging you,… that you would consider listening to the community.”

Plavac proposes moving Williams students to Prairie View

In response to a question from Plavac, Director of FTE and State Reporting Kim Neal clarified that Williams Elementary will stay open until the Lincoln K-8 is completed. Plavac responded, “So if [Williams] is in such poor disrepair… why don’t we move them over to Prairie View?” Neal said Prairie View was only approved as a “transition school,” and it would need significant improvements to be approved as a “full elementary.”

Director of Planning and Construction Suzanne Wynn said that because the school was only being used as a transition school, the permitting organization gave them “a pass on doing certain things that we needed to do, in terms of ADA modifications, etc.” She said it would probably take “a couple years” to make those changes and added that the bus loop is another concern because there is only one road into the school, so parents and bus traffic would use the same road.

Consensus

Summarizing the discussion, Vu said, “It sounds like there are some misgivings about [Draft] D, the way it was redrafted, based on our consensus. And I just want to be clear on that — I’m in favor of kind of keeping changes made, as is.” He said he heard consensus around moving the Foster magnet to Metcalfe and getting more information about zoning exemptions, and he asked staff to look at future growth in areas currently zoned for over-capacity schools “and then maybe they all can be absorbed into Terwilliger, because they’re at 76% right now.” He said there was also consensus for keeping Duval as it is. 

High schools

Gilreath said that since there was consensus on Draft C for middle schools at the February 26 workshop, he was going to move on to Draft D for high schools. At the workshop, the board asked for all of Haile Plantation to be zoned to Buchholz (an additional 146 students), and Durant Estates, Beville Heights, Mill Pond, and portions of Gwynn Oaks (21 students) were also moved from GHS to Buchholz. The updates would put Buchholz at 101% of capacity, with Eastside at 86%, GHS at 97%, Hawthorne Middle/High at 62%, Newberry at 97%, and Santa Fe at 92%. Gilreath reminded the board that future development will increase the number of students at Newberry and Santa Fe. 

High school capacity (the Hawthorne number is an error and should be 62%)

Rockwell asked staff to bring back information on zoning exemptions at Buchholz “because it looks like we have a very high number — that might be able to relieve the capacity issue there.” She asked Wynn whether there are plans to increase high school capacity beyond the next five years, and Wynn said she would suggest looking at building a multi-story classroom building at Newberry High School, which has a much lower capacity than the other high schools. Vu also pointed out that there are a lot of choice programs at Buchholz, “and that’s definitely something we should look at, especially in the next phase, when we look over curriculum and programs and strategic planning across the district.”

Click here to see the boundary maps created after the March 3 meeting.

April School Board meeting will be on April 21

During board member requests, the board agreed to cancel the April 7 School Board meeting and hold a meeting on April 21. 

Plavac also said the Superintendent search has “been pushed to after the summer,” and she asked for that topic to be placed on the agenda of the next School Board meeting. Vu agreed, saying he’d hoped to have a Superintendent in place by January to have a transition period between January and July. Certain pointed out that the board did not “nail down a timeline,” and Vu agreed but said they’d “talked about generalities of when to get someone in.” He said it would be good to have that discussion in April.