School officials: Morris necessary

Dalton Board of Education member Rick Fromm said Morris Innovative High School is one of the few things he’s more excited about now than he was when it began being discussed.

The story of Morris is one Dalton Public Schools officials said they’re eager to share with the public, and they had ample time to do so at Monday’s forum sponsored by The Daily Citizen and the Dalton Board of Education at City Hall. About 100 people attended the event and posed questions to Fromm, Board Chairman Danny Crutchfield, and several school administrators.

Crutchfield said he was nervous about participating in the forum but believed it was the right thing to do. Besides, he added, officials don’t have all the answers and are open for suggestions.

“It takes unity to build community. It’s actually in the word,” he said. “We’ve got to have people with us. If you don’t believe in what we’re doing, I’m glad you’re here.”

Daily Citizen Publisher William Bronson said he wanted to supplement the paper’s coverage with more opportunities for people to hear public officials respond to questions and interact with them.

“We think this is a positive thing,” he said.

Beginnings

Dalton High Principal Debbie Freeman said the need for Morris began when she realized several years ago that about half of high school freshmen nationwide fail language arts or math or both their ninth-grade year. Students needed a way to catch up on credits once they’d fallen behind, so Dalton High formed a credit recovery program that grew from one period a day to full time.

Finally, the number of students being served in the program grew so large, and the program was so effective at catching students up, administrators decided to expand it to its own school. In 2009, Morris Innovative was born. If students were behind in credits, counselors urged them to enroll at Morris, but they were allowed to stay at Dalton High School if they wanted to.

Last year, Freeman said, administrators noticed the number of students attending Morris was growing smaller because students were catching up so quickly and returning back to Dalton.

“So we thought about and brainstormed, ‘How do we make Morris become a school of choice instead of just a school for credit recovery?’” Freeman said.

Why not Dalton High?

Morris Principal Jennifer Phinney said the school has begun adding some sports and new career pathways not offered at Dalton High. She hired teachers for art, health care science and a newly formed leadership academy.

Morris Innovative’s innovations continued. Next year, the school is expected to expand from 300 to about 500 students in its new location at the Fort Hill campus.

Moving students back to Dalton High wasn’t a good option for a couple of reasons, administrators said. For one thing, many students perform better in a smaller, non-traditional school environment. Adding more students to a Dalton High that is already more than 1,400 students strong wouldn’t accomplish that.

“(Our students) like a smaller school,” Phinney said. “They like the fact that all the adults in the building know who they are.”

Second, if Morris went away and every student enrolled at Dalton High, the school would be at 100 percent capacity with about 1,700 students, class sizes of 32 rather than 28 students, and enrollment expected to continue rising.

Teachers would have to share classrooms, Superintendent Jim Hawkins said, meaning they’d spend more time moving between rooms and less time on instruction.

Cost vs. benefit

Board of Education members have voted to spend $2.8 million to move Morris from its location near Blue Ridge School to the larger Fort Hill campus over the summer while their current location is renovated. They plan to spend a little more than $19 million more to renovate Morris’s current location and move students back there later.

At the same time, building an entirely new high school would cost about $60 million, Hawkins said.

Officials are planning to fund Morris with a combination of local and state monies and are hoping long-term for an Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (ESPLOST). Voters will decide July 31 whether to pass the 1 percent tax, which is proposed to fund a number of projects for Dalton Public Schools and Whitfield County Schools.

Yet there are many things school officials could spend those dollars on, including academics in other areas.

Spending per student is down by $1,300 to about $8,000 annually because of budget cuts, but overall performance as measured by state-mandated tests is up, officials said. Yet Hawkins cautioned the community hasn’t seen the full impact of some of the cuts and won’t for a few years.

The impact of cutting some academic programs, such as the Literacy Collaborative and Reading Recovery — both intensive language programs designed to ensure students have a solid language arts foundation — won’t be fully evident until those students reach middle school and high school where they’re expected to perform at higher levels without as much early education, Hawkins said.

Crutchfield said it’s more important to spend enough on programs that work than it is to try to spend the least possible while trying to maintain status quo.

“If you spend it all and you don’t accomplish anything, to me, that’s the waste,” he said.

One man in the audience, who declined to give his name, gestured to the walls around him in what some have described as an unnecessarily fancy City Hall and pondered why the community wasn’t more willing to spend for schools.

“It’s amazing to sit around and look at this monstrosity of a wonderful building that I’m sitting in,” he said. “But you know what, where are our priorities?”

Dalton Middle needs

Dalton Middle School will soon be expanded, officials said, under a new plan to address overcrowding there. Fromm described it as “a very high priority for the district.”

While officials’ plans for high school students is to offer the option for a smaller school, their vision for middle school students is the opposite. Yet officials said it works — they just need more space.

“I have kids in every room except the restroom having class, and that’s not meant as a joke,” said middle school Principal Brian Suits. “Every other room is at capacity.”

In fact, the school of 1,626 was at capacity at 1,500 students and is out of compliance for facilities requirements for its cafeteria. Lunch is served from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. non-stop, he said, but a new serving line and expanded seating space should soon address that problem.

Suits said the district is adding four trailers to the building and plans to build an auxiliary gym since the student body has grown so large it’s hard to give kids the physical education time they need with only one facility.

Building an entirely new middle school would cost about $35 million, Suits said, but the renovations and improvements are only $10.6 million.

“We take ‘large’ and we do it well and we make it feel very small,” he said. “We have a lot of parents who are very nervous in the fourth and fifth grade, and then they get (to the middle school) and they take a tour, their child gets on a team, and they’re set for three years.”

Board members said the school is actually three schools within one because of the way administrators have divided it up. Each of the grades six through eight is its own mini-school, they said.

Fromm said officials considered nearly 40 options to address overcrowding at the middle school but in response to public input decided the best and least expensive one was to simply expand Dalton Middle. Board members at one time considered rezoning students and converting Park Creek School from an elementary school to a school for sixth-graders. They scrapped the idea after public outcry.

Except for in 2011, Dalton Middle has consistently met academic, testing and attendance requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The school is expected to house about 1,680 students this fall.

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School officials: Morris necessary

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