“We got so much feedback from those two groups [of parents] that it was obvious we didn’t want to move in that direction,” says school board member Beverly Slough.
“It just doesn’t appear to be in the best interest of our kids,” Taylor says, “it seems like a quick fix, and we’re not looking at things through a long-term strategy.”The board’s current strategy would be to move about 400 students from PBMS to SMS next year to relieve its overcrowding issue. Right now, the board says PBMS has 1525 students. The school’s capacity is 1228.
SMS, currently, has 630 students, with a capacity of 872, according to the board. If those students from PBMS were zoned there next year, the school would have 1,027 students before its 8th-grade class moves on, which is about 150 students over capacity. The board projects around 844 students at SMS next year.But at the center of the overcrowding problem is the county’s growth, board members tell me.