Facing higher costs, more open seats, Duval schools weigh new closings. Which ones will go?

Strained by budget overruns, Duval County school officials are weighing closing dozens of schools whose futures seemed certain after voters approved a half-penny sales tax for building improvements in 2020.

The closings could eliminate two high schools — Westside High and A. Philip Randolph Career Academies — and shutter much-loved grade schools including Atlantic Beach Elementary and John Stockton Elementary, last year ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the county's second-best elementary and 50th in the state.

But the list of threatened schools remains fluid and may change again before School Board members schedule public meetings to outline reasons closings are being sought and to seek feedback.

“It’s being iterated and changed as we speak,” School Board Chair Darryl Willie said Thursday, adding that a timeframe for bringing the plan to the public could be in place this week.

The School Board hasn’t approved any new school closings and members have voiced deep misgivings about proposals offered last month by administrators working under Superintendent Dana Kriznar.

More about the proposal: To plan feeder patterns for Jacksonville schools, administrators figured in these closings

Looking back: It's been a year since Duval Schools' sales tax launched. How are things going?

But a looming gap in construction funding that could total as much as $1.4 billion is pushing members toward distasteful options.

“We’ve got a financial scenario on our hands that just is not going to end well if we don’t adjust,” School Board member Kelly Coker said during a workshop last month.

The threatened buildings were all slated for work, varying from ordinary maintenance to total replacement, that was part of a $1.9 billion facilities initiative dubbed “the Bold Plan” the board adopted in 2019 that relied partly on the sales tax.

A number of other schools were already scheduled to be closed as part of the Bold Plan, which tries to deal both with the deterioration of many aging schools and decreasing enrollment countywide.

The Bold Plan includes construction of 28 new schools, including several now under construction.

School officials have been revisiting that initiative since last fall, after costs at the first projects funded by the sales tax finished so far over budget that completing the entire work list was recalculated to cost $3.9 billion — more than twice the price voters heard before approving the tax.

Old problem: Duval schools' age shows; district says sales tax would ease years of maintenance backlog

No one has proposed increasing or extending the sales tax.

Instead, Kriznar’s team has suggested school closings and consolidations that were framed as bolstering “feeder patterns” to keep neighborhood children attending classes together with fewer disruptions as they advance to higher grades.

“I think we’re going to have some beautiful schools and some really tight feeder patterns before we’re done,” Kriznar told the board.

Why close Westside High?

Elements of the new plan drew pushback almost as soon as they were outlined.

Board member Warren Jones challenged the reasoning behind closing Westside High, noting that people connected to the school were told when the Bold Plan was developed that Westside would be rebuilt.

"That's the only high school that we're closing that we promised to rebuild on-site. And that's a problem for me," he said when the closings were discussed in a workshop last month. Jones said the district he represents faces a disproprortionate number of closings and that "clearly, some of them need to happen. I'm just not certain that Westside is one."

An early version of the closings list recommended shutting down Ed White High instead of Westside, but that was changed because Ed White can be refurbished and updated without the expense of building a replacement from the ground up, school district Chief of Staff Corey Wright told Jones.

Closing A. Philip Randolph was suggested as a possibility separate from the feed syste plans, in a rundown of magnet schools with low use. Only 28 percent of the school's capacity is utilized, administrators reported.

If the board approves it, the new plan would replace the Bold Plan, the 15-year work list to address deteriorating buildings that the board and former Superintendent Diana Greene championed and that supporters promoted during a sales-tax referendum that voters approved two-to-one in November 2020.

Willie said any facilities plan the board advances will work to keep the core goals of the Bold Plan but that its supporters always recognized a 15-year plan would likely require some changes before the last items were completed.

Enrollment changes fueled by the surging presence of publicly funded charter schools have accelerated those changes, as have dramatic increases in construction prices since the pandemic.

Kriznar’s plan proposed feeder patterns leading to a dozen high schools while bypassing high schools that are centered around magnet programs in academics, arts, technology and medicine as well as others serving specialized student populations spread across the county.

Will "A" schools close too?

Unlike earlier generations of closings that were tied to low student achievement, the proposed shutdowns include a half-dozen “A”-ranked grade schools: Fishweir, Lone Star and Seabreeze elementaries as well as Anchor Academy and Atlantic Beach and John Stockton.

Kriznar’s new feeder plan would consolidate a number of relatively small schools to operate more efficiently, sometimes replacing whole bunches of old, often thinly used neighborhood schools with a single larger new facility.

For example, Pickett Elementary on Old Kings Road, whose 156 students use just 46 percent of the 1957-vintage building’s capacity, would be bulldozed and replaced by a new K-8 school built to serve Pickett’s current students and those attending Biltmore, Thomas Jefferson, Reynolds Lane and Annie R. Morgan elementaries, all several miles west or northwest of Jacksonville’s core.

Utilization rates at the county’s schools had dropped from 82 percent when the Bold Plan was created to 76 percent early in this school year, School Board members were told in November. Closings and consolidations are aimed at raising the school utilization rate closer to a goal of 85 percent.

Combined, the five elementaries have just over 1,200 students, and the additional grade levels in a K-8 would fit within administrators’ recommendation for that type of school to house 1,100 to 1,500 students.

To operate efficiently, said a plan shown to board members in March, elementary schools should have 800 to 1,200 students; middle schools should have 1,200; and high schools should have 2,400 students.

The new Pickett K-8 would become a feeder school for Raines High School, but its creation could also complicate plans for some Northside students.

Pickett had been scheduled to be the place where students from Reynolds Lane and S.A. Hull elementaries would be consolidated into a new Pickett Elementary, whose students would move temporarily to S.A. Hull next school year so construction of the new elementary could start.

But plans affecting Pickett and several other schools — Venetia, Englewood and Seabreeze elementaries among them — were put on “strategic pause” while the board reconsidered the facilities plan, Assistant Superintendent for Operations Erika Harding said during a board workshop in March.

Willie said decisions about whether to end that pause will be made on a case-by-case basis, but that he didn’t know of any projects where planning or design work that was delayed have resumed.

Individual board members have also advanced scenarios where several schools with fewer than 500 students apiece — Holiday Hill, Kings Trail, Woodland Acres and Garden City elementaries — might remain open as “micro schools,” but because of less efficiency would raise yearly operating costs that the board would have to see covered somehow.

A single item from Kriznar’s proposal, consolidating students from little-used R.V. Daniels Elementary into the campus of R.L. Brown Gifted and Talented Academy, has been discussed for months and is scheduled to be considered by the board as a standalone action Tuesday evening.

Other ideas discussed for the facility plan would have substantial impacts on where young people attend middle grades before entering some high schools.

Baldwin Middle-High School would become solely a high school under a feeder pattern Kriznar's staff suggested, with middle school students from Baldwin attending the new Chaffee Trail Middle School now under construction. Children from Mamie Agnes Jones, Whitehouse, Crystal Springs and Chaffee Trail elementaries would also graduate into that middle school, and graduates from there and from Westview K-8 would enter Baldwin High.

An alternative to Fletcher High's feeder pattern, raised after school district staff talked with Beaches-area School Board member April Carney, would replace the Beaches' neighborhood-based elementary and middle schools with three K-8 schools — Mayport, Fletcher and Neptune Beach — whose graduates would enter high school at Fletcher.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Duval schools eye closings to handle rising building costs. Which ones?