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Freshmen center discussed
Published 8/15/2007 in News : Education By Emily Behlmann
Building a separate facility only for Garden City's ninth-graders would take a significant portion of students -- about 570 this year, according to early projections -- out of the crowded Garden City High School building, while also isolating students at an age group when they frequently are subject to peer pressure, members of a GCHS facility study group said Tuesday night.
However, the group also determined a ninth-grade center could have negative effects, and it would do little to solve some of the other concerns administrators have raised regarding GCHS facilities.
Tuesday's meeting was the third in a series of 10. At each meeting, district staff, students and community members are examining a possible solution to what administrators have said is an overcrowded high school with inadequate science labs, music rooms, gymnasiums, locker rooms, athletic practice fields and other facilities.
After the meetings, these sub-committees will meet as a larger study group to report their findings, and the group will choose an option to recommend to the USD 457 Board of Education.
GCHS Principal James Mireles, who is expecting about 2,000 students to return to his school on the first full day of classes Thursday, said removing freshmen from the main building would make the school easier to manage -- both in terms of overall student count and discipline issues. About 85 percent of discipline problems at GCHS are related to freshmen, he said.
Rosio Ibarra, who graduated from GCHS last year, sees advantages to separating the ninth-graders. Students are not as mature freshman year as they are sophomore year, and they are easily influenced by upperclassmen who encourage them to skip class or drink, she said.
She also sees a need for more mentoring during freshman year, something Mireles said would be more feasible at a ninth-grade center, where counselors wouldn't have to focus on making sure seniors graduate.
"You need more supervision as a freshman," Ibarra said. "If I could go back to any year in high school, I would go back to freshman year and get better grades. ... I could have had A's my freshman year."
Debbie Berkley, a group participant who works as the Educational Talent Search director at Garden City Community College, said her daughter attended a school system in which ninth-graders attend junior high. She said she likes the idea of having ninth-grade away from upperclassmen because they are less likely to date older students.
Also a parent, Bill Weatherly, associate principal of GCHS, said the age disparity between a 14-year-old freshman and GCHS's oldest seniors, some of whom are 21, is a concern for him.
If USD 457 were to build a ninth-grade center, his preference would be to make it a separate entity, complete with its own cafeteria, gymnasium, music programs, activities and athletics.
However, committee members said other systems also could be developed, like transporting ninth-graders to the main campus for some needs -- possibly forensics or a few upper-level classes -- and having teachers travel to the ninth-grade center for others.
Mireles said mixing ninth-graders with the older students for some activities could be an advantage.
"It would be a slower process for bringing them in than dropping them off at the front door and saying, 'Swim,'" he said.
Nonetheless, a ninth-grade center would add a school-to-school transition to students' school careers. Committee members listed the transition as a negative aspect of the ninth-grade-center plan because a district research group recommended in the spring that USD 457's overall organizational plan include no more than three transitions.
Currently, students in the school district have three transitions as they attend an elementary school for kindergarten through fourth grade, intermediate center for fifth and sixth, middle school for seventh and eighth, and high school for ninth through 12th.
Group members also said the ninth-grade center wouldn't solve all the problems the committee is trying to address, and it wouldn't necessarily be a long-term solution if the district were to see more growth.
GCHS was built to comfortably hold about 1,500, so removing 500 or 600 freshmen could put the building at or just less than capacity, instead of well over, Superintendent Rick Atha said. That would enable the school to eliminate the mobile classrooms that now house about 250 students every class period, but after that, the school might not even have room to achieve another study group goal: providing classrooms for all 14 of the traveling teachers who carry their class materials on a cart.
Further needs, like updating science labs and opening space for vocational programs, also would need to be addressed, Atha said.
Several group members said a ninth-grade center would need to be a long-term solution for it to gain public support, since a bond issue would be required. The group couldn't determine specific cost estimates Tuesday night, since they didn't know the building's capacity, what it would include or where it would be built. However, Stewart Nelson, an architect with Gibson, Mancini, Carmichael & Nelson, said the building itself probably would cost at least $20 million, not including athletic fields, architect fees, land costs and other expenses.
One way to make the center more long-term would be to make it large enough that it could become a second high school in the future, Weatherly said.
However, group members wondered how voters would react to that idea, since bond issues were rejected in 1998 and 2000 for construction of a second high school. At the time, opponents cited concerns including the expense of operating another school, the cost of paying for the initial project ($30 million in 1998 and $33 million in 2000) and the effect splitting the high school would have on community unity and athletic competitiveness.
The district also began plans for a November 2002 bond issue to build an $18 million ninth-grade center, but the board decided three months before the scheduled election to postpone the issue indefinitely, citing poor economic conditions and lack of support from the community.
A new proposal for a ninth-grade center with intentions of expansion could be seen as "an underhanded way to build a second high school," study group chairwoman Jean Clifford said.
In addition, Jeff Tanner, assistant athletic director and Discovery Program teacher, said separating ninth-graders could be seen as a positive step, and that converting to a second high school would then be seen as going backward.
Regardless of whether the school district had aspirations of making a ninth-grade center into a second high school, it would need to be honest with the voters, Mireles said.
And almost all plans are going to cost tax dollars, GCHS senior Jarett Payne said, so the main focus should be on the best solution in terms of education.
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