County school officials spent

some time Monday trying to figure out how to relieve overcrowding at Fayette

County High School before a fifth county high school is opened.

A number of options were mentioned

at Monday night's Board of Education work session, from adding even more

trailers to relocating the ninth grade to LaFayette Educational Center

to asking for student volunteers to transfer to Sandy Creek High.

Plans for a new high school

have already been put in motion, but that campus, to be south of Fayetteville,

will not be opened before fall 2004 at the earliest.

Meanwhile, Fayette County High

is already above its core capacity and has about 1,000 more students than

Sandy Creek, school board member Janet Smola said Monday.

What might seem like the simplest

solution changing the boundary lines is not so simple with the new school

on the horizon. School officials want to avoid making students change

districts now only to have to change again in three years.

"All possible moves have

ramifications," Superintendent John DeCotis said of the various possiblities

for overcrowding relief. "The bottom line is, the student population

is growing all over the county, and something will have to give."

School system staff emphasized

that a key component of any solution would be finding areas without mass

student movement, and preventing incidences where students would have

to drive past one school to attend another.

School official Jerry Whitaker

showed board members a map of possible changes, saying that research is

ongoing to develop what he called "a definitive feeder pattern,"

where all students at a particular elementary school would go to the same

middle school and high school.

The newest elementary school

to be constructed in the area will be Cleveland Elementary on Lester Road.

The site is right now at the western edge of Fayetteville and might be

annexed into the city. Depending upon how the boundary lines are constructed,

students from that school could end up at Sandy Creek or Fayette County

High, Whitaker said.

Smola said that her chief concern

is what the possible addition of trailers at Fayette County would do to

safety concerns, especially while Sandy Creek is not yet at its core capacity.

A study has begun to determine

the logistics of putting the entire ninth-grade class from Fayette County

at LaFayette Center, which housed Fayette County High before the current

campus was built. That would fill the center's 'D' building and essentially

create a new school of some 600 students, according to staff.

If that were done, efforts

would have to be made to keep movement across Tiger Trail to a minimum,

but it would not be unavoidable, because ninth-grade students take more

electives than other grades and most teachers do not teach only one grade.

Research by county staff shows

that LaFayette Center would likely need improvements to its lunchroom

facilities to accommodate these students, along with the addition of a

media center, foreign language lab, writing lab and science lab. The required

improvements, plus hiring of faculty and staff to manage the facility,

would take an entire school year.

School board members indicated

Monday that immediate redistricting is not a worthwhile option because

they do not want any students moving twice.

They directed DeCotis and the

staff to keep looking at short-term solutions like the LaFayette option,

and perhaps convincing some students to voluntarily transfer to Sandy

Creek, in which case the county would work out a bus schedule to get them

there.

The board will probably discuss

the matter again at the next meeting, scheduled for May 21.

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