Trace Crossings, Gwin parents speak up loudly about Hoover school rezoning
Hoover school officials didn’t get as warm a reception Tuesday night for the superintendent’s school rezoning proposal as they did on Thursday at the first community feedback meeting.
On Tuesday night, the vast majority of public commenters spoke in opposition to the proposal. Most were from the communities that currently feed students to Trace Crossings and Gwin elementary schools.
Numerous Trace Crossings parents said it’s not right to force children living in the Trace Crossings residential development to go outside of their neighborhood to attend South Shades Crest Elementary for kindergarten through second grade and Brock’s Gap Intermediate School for grades 3-5.
Seventy-two percent of the 431 students at Trace Crossings would be moved to a new school next year because of the rezoning proposal, unless some took advantage of a 1-year “grandfathering” plan that would be offered to students in grades 1 and 4, school system records indicate.
Trace Crossings has worked hard in recent years to overcome the stigma of being a troubled school due to some lower test scores — a label many parents and school officials say is unmerited. They thought a rezoning plan would help revitalize the school, but instead “Trace Crossings has been effectively dissolved,” one mother said.
Shilpa Gaggar, treasurer of the Trace Crossings Elementary Parent Teacher Organization, said Trace Crossings was designed to be an all-inclusive neighborhood, complete with single-family homes, apartments, schools, churches, doctors, dentists and businesses all in the same community. Parents don’t think their community should be torn apart, she said.
“Deer Valley still goes to Deer Valley Elementary. Riverchase still goes to Riverchase Elementary, and Greystone still goes to Greystone Elementary,” Gaggar said. “But the majority of Trace Crossings will no longer go to Trace Crossings Elementary … We don’t feel it benefits our community or our school.”
Under the rezoning proposal, Trace Crossings also would be the only elementary school where students would be split apart to go to two different middle schools — Simmons and Bumpus. That’s not fair or beneficial to students, particularly at the socially vulnerable middle school age, parents said.
If the rezoning proposal were approved as is, Trace Crossings would only be 71 percent full, parents noted. They don’t believe children in the Trace Crossings community should be forced to leave when there is still room at the school, they said.
Former Hoover Councilman Jody Patterson, a home builder who built his home in Trace Crossings 22 years ago, said Trace Crossings was planned, marketed and developed as a package, complete with schools. U.S. Steel, the landowner behind the Trace Crossings development, donated the 40 acres for Trace Crossings Elementary with the full understanding that the school would be for the Trace Crossings community, Patterson said.
“I think it’s a terrible idea to mess with your neighborhood schools,” Patterson said.
Parents in The Preserve community were equally upset about being rezoned from Gwin Elementary to Trace Crossings.
“Trace sounds like an amazing school, but we love Gwin,” said Christi Finn, a mother of two who lives in The Preserve.
The federal court, U.S. Department of Justice and NAACP Legal Defense Fund may be interested in diversity in schools, but Gwin already is a diverse school, with higher percentages of black and Hispanic students than the percentage of the general population in Hoover, Alabama or the nation, Finn said.
Murphy said in the past the federal court had given approval for students, particularly those in apartments in Hoover, to be moved to schools farther from their homes to better desegregate Hoover schools. But that is no longer acceptable to the court because it disproportionately negatively impacted black and lower-income students, Murphy said.
The current rezoning effort is an attempt to undo those actions and get students back closer to their homes.
Laura Jackman, another Gwin parent, asked if anyone had asked the black and lower-income families that are being moved to schools a little closer to their homes whether they really wanted to change schools. She’s not certain the benefit of shorter travel time outweighs the negative impact of tearing their social networks apart, she said.
Murphy said the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a party to the federal desegregation lawsuit, is advocating for those students.
Shane Solomon, another parent from The Preserve, said he and his family purposefully bought a home within half a mile from Gwin so their children could walk to school. Under the rezoning proposal, they’ll have to travel 3.8 miles and cross a busy highway — John Hawkins Parkway — to get to Trace Crossings, he said.
The federal court may not want apartment complexes to be treated as “enclaves” that are picked up and moved to a school farther away, but “we don’t want that for our kids either,” Solomon said.
Trisha Crain, a longtime resident of the Green Valley community, said Hoover City Schools would not be having so many troubles now if the Hoover City Council in 2004 had not fundamentally changed the process for funding Hoover schools.
For fiscal 2005, the council voted to quit providing 16 percent of the city’s sales tax revenues to the school system each year. That decision, plus some smaller previous funding cuts, cost the Hoover school system $78 million over the past 14 years, city records show.
That money could have been used to build a new elementary school in Ross Bridge and a third high school, Crain said.
The council in December voted to increase its financial support for schools by about $1.3 million or $1.5 million a year, but the city is still giving much less to schools than it once did. Even with increased funding approved in December for fiscal 2016, the city’s contribution to schools will be nearly $8.1 million less than it would have been under the original funding formula.
“There are a lot of people to blame for us being hamstrung for the last 12 years,” Crain said.
Hoover residents have an opportunity in this year’s municipal elections, with the economy rebounding, to make sure their local government is supporting the growth it has allowed, she said.
Murphy said she and school officials will continue to listen to community input before she drafts a final proposal for the Hoover Board of Education to consider around March 7. If a final proposal is approved, it will be submitted to the federal court for approval, she said.
The goal is to get a rezoning plan approved for the 2016-17 school year, she said. If school officials don’t propose their own plan, the federal court likely will impose its own plan on the school system, she said.
Murphy said her rezoning proposal would shift an estimated 2,500 students to a new school attendance zone for the next school year, though all students in grades 8-11 would have the option to stay in their current high school zone, and students in grades 1 and 4 would have an option to remain at their current school for one more year. See more about Murphy's rezoning proposal here.
School officials will have three more meetings for the public to give feedback on her rezoning proposal, including an extra one that has been added for Monday night due to a conflict at Hoover High School. Here is the schedule for those meetings:
- Thursday, Feb. 18, 6-8 p.m., Green Valley Baptist Church, 1815 Patton Chapel Road (for families from Simmons Middle School and Gwin, Green Valley and Bluff Park elementary schools)
- Monday, Feb. 22, 6-8 p.m. location to be determined
- Tuesday, Feb. 23, 6-8 p.m., Spain Park High School, 4700 Jaguar Drive (for families from Spain Park High, Berry Middle and Riverchase, Rocky Ridge, Greystone and Shades Mountain elementary schools)
The public also can view more details about the rezoning proposal and see maps of proposed school attendance zones at hooverrezoning.com. Parents also can see which schools their children would attend by typing in their address to a school location software program on the website, as well as provide feedback via a survey.