By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph School District boundaries won’t be changing; at least, anytime soon.
The St. Joseph School Board has put off discussing whether school boundaries should be redrawn after administrators asked for more time to devise a long-term plan for the district.
St. Joseph School Superintendent Gabe Edgar says the administration is in the process of putting together a long-term plan for the district to present to the school board.
“I understand that people out there are anxious and a lot of people want us to do something, but I just want to make sure that what we do is right for kids,” Edgar tells host Barry Birr in a recent KFEQ Hotline segment.
Edgar says the biggest problem with boundaries facing the district involves the middle schools. St. Joseph has two middle schools that instruct students from 6th to 8th Grades and two that incorporate only 7th and 8th Grade students. One elementary school feeds into all four middle schools.
Edgar says discussion about school boundaries is nothing new.
“They’ve been talking about boundaries for 25 years, probably,” Edgar says. “It’s been a topic of conversation definitely in the six years that I’ve been here and we’re close and I think that we can put a long-range plan together that will do what’s best for kids. It’s just a matter of will the public agree with that or will the Board of Education approve that?”
Edgar plans to have a rough draft of a long-range plan to present to the Facilities Committee meeting in February. It would then go before the St. Joseph Board of Education as a review item during its February meeting. It would return to the Facilities Committee in March to be revised before being submitted to school board members in March.
Edgar says the district needs to consider whether it needs four middle schools and 13 elementary schools.
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