After SPLOST Passage, APS to Consider Plans for New Buckhead Elementary School

Buckhead public school supporters are looking to the future after Tuesday’s passage of SPLOST IV by strong margins.

The Atlanta Public Schools’ will receive up to $520 million from the continuation of the 1-cent sales tax, which received 63 percent support in Fulton County, whose separate SPLOST was tied in with the city of Atlanta vote.

“On behalf of our students, I thank local voters for their commitment to education and for providing the resources needed through their approval of the SPLOST extension for new school construction, refurbishments and expansion, including IT and security upgrades,” Superintendent Erroll B. Davis Jr. said in a statement.

“Their decision will result in a continuation of the ongoing effort started a decade and a half ago to provide quality, up-to-date facilities that enhance the learning environment for the children of Atlanta,” Davis said.

“In this economy and anti-tax environment, I was more worried than I was five years ago,” said Julie Salisbury, co-founder of the Atlanta School Board: Stand Up or Step Down organization, a parents group that monitors the Atlanta School Board. “I’m pleased and thrilled as a parent and property owner and taxpayer that it passed. The beautiful thing is that it shares the cost as opposed to feeling it as an additional burden on property taxes.”

The APS SPLOST IV program, passed after the school cheating scandal and the removal of APS high schools from accreditation program, sets aside money for several major Buckhead projects, including the construction of a new elementary school to alleviate overcrowding.

Under the plan, bonds for the new will be paid off by tax proceeds.  Overcrowded is to receive a new gymnasium and classroom space, while will undergo renovation and receive new classrooms. E. Rivers, where the auditorium presently is being used for four classrooms, was slated for renovation under the previous SPLOST, but the work was delayed because of the falloff in sales tax revenue from the recession.

The location of the new elementary school in Buckhead likely will involve a similar politically heated process as the search for a new high school site. Davis said at a community meeting at North Atlanta before the SPLOST vote that issues such as the new elementary’s location and plans to alleviate overcrowding at will depend on results of a pending demographic study. The Atlanta School Board will make the final decision on a new elementary, and middle school plans. Last spring, proposals rose to make the present Sutton building a separate sixth grade academy and the present North Atlanta a seventh and eighth-grade school, but Davis at the public meeting said he had not heard of those plans. Two separate middle schools are another option.

“Plans regarding new elementary and middle schools for the Buckhead area are contingent on the results of the demographic study, scheduled to be released over the next several months,” APS spokesman Keith Bromery said in an e-mail  “The E. Rivers Elementary School expansion is also contingent on the results of the demographics study.”

Salisbury said she had faith that Davis will make a well-reasoned decision on the new elementary, although the board will make the final choice. “One of the things as a parent that’s given me confidence in Erroll Davis’ leadership is that he acts and makes his decisions based on information and community input.  I trust that he would gather the right input from the community coupled with the right demographic research so that the best long-term plan would be made.”

One possibility for the new elementary school is land on Northside Parkway where the new high school is already under development. The former IBM corporate campus could have enough land for an elementary school, Salisbury said. It’s also the site of the private Trinity School.