Committee to review school boundaries

A school district committee will review Cape Girardeau's current neighborhood elementary school system and consider if the district should switch to grade-level centers.

School officials say the committee will look at how elementary grades are organized as part of a broader mission to study whether elementary school boundaries need to be redrawn.

Cape Girardeau schools superintendent Dr. David Scala said he's working to put together a committee of school district faculty and staff and community members.

The committee likely would begin meeting before the end of the current school year in May, Scala said. The committee is expected to make a final report to school officials by January.

The Cape Girardeau School District has five elementary schools throughout the city in which students kindergarten through fourth grade attend.

If the district were to establish grade-level centers, all the students in a single grade would attend the same school, officials said.

The school board last summer approved a wide-ranging strategic plan that requires the district to study elementary school neighborhood boundaries every three years.

School officials say the goal is to keep enrollment balanced at the elementary schools. That prevents a school from being overcrowded while another is underutilized, officials said.

Scala said he also expects the committee to study whether the district needs to consider building a new elementary school west of Interstate 55 to serve a growing area of the city.

School board President Sharon Mueller said the committee's task is part of the district's overall policy to evaluate its operations. "We need to reexamine everything we do on a regular basis," she said. "Just because we are getting a committee together doesn't mean we have to make changes."

But, she said, the district needs to look at all possibilities to make sure the district's educational plans determine facility use rather than the other way around.

Before the strategic plan passed last summer, the district hadn't reviewed the neighborhood school boundaries on a regular basis, she said. That made changes all the more traumatic for parents when boundaries were redrawn in the late 1990s, she said.

By reviewing boundaries every three years, changes will be less dramatic, she said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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