Politics & Government

Transparency Seen in New APS Options

But plan for separate Buckhead middle schools raises concerns for school activist

Buckhead public school activist Julie Salisbury expressed support for the two Friday, but raised concerns over the proposal for two separate middle schools.

Salisbury saluted the APS demographers for responding in full measure to community output in response to an earlier set of four options released at the end of last year. Those options brought widespread outrage. She praised the new options for following

"This telegraphs something new and different about APS," said Salisbury, a co-founder of the Step Up for Public Schools group. "After the hue and cry from different areas, it looks like they took a lot of community input and did a good job of listening to community guidelines. Those guidelines were very much on point with the bulk of the community input I heard."

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She raised concern over the new options' call for separate middle schools, one at the current site and the other at the present site.

Under Option A, she said, and Elementary students will go to the present Sutton site. Bolton Academy, , and would go to the North Atlanta site.

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"The ssue that I have with that is that is robs us of the real healthy multicultural mix that Sutton enjoys now," she said. "One of the undiscovered wonders of what we have in the northern  cluster is an education environment  that really mirrors the real world. I would hate to lose that."

In option B, Garden Hills would go to the Sutton site, she said. That plan would result in more of a multicultural environment at Sutton, she said.

Last spring, before the demographics study that resulted in the demographers' proposals, APS mentioned placing a separate sixth grade academy at the Sutton site and seventh and eighth grades at the current North Atlanta site. All of Buckhead's elementaries would have fed into the sixth grade academy and the separate seventh and eighth grade.

The new options keep the Pine Hills neighborhood in the Sarah Smith district. Pine Hills parents strongly objected to being placed in the Garden Hills district under the previous options, saying that families would have to cross major highways to get to school.

The E. Rivers community is also kept intact, with both options calling for the construction of a new E. Rivers school. E. Rivers parents had strongly opposed a previous option to split the community and move students to Bolton Academy.

The current Bolton Academy community is also kept together under the new options, Salisbury said.


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