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To provide support that they feel their students have been denied for years now, the members of the Buena Vista School Board last week approved moving second grade students from F.W. Kling Elementary School to join third through fifth grade at Enderly Heights Elementary School in the fall.
Currently, there are 260 students at Kling and 200 students at Enderly.
“So, you can see we’ve got a lot more students at Kling, even though it’s a smaller school, than we do at Enderly, and I think that’s really what’s driving this,” Superintendent Tony Francis said to the Board at its March meeting last Tuesday.
“It would give us the flexibility to put in a self-contained classroom [for students with disabilities] and do some things that we just have not been able to do to support our students.”
As mentioned in previous discussions about this move, Kling is in need of space as instruction is taking place on the cafeteria stage during lunch times, in outdoor “learning cottages” as Kling Principal Lisa Clark called them, and even in closets.
“We have outgrown Kling as far as keeping all grade levels through second grade there,” Assistant Superintendent Gennifer Miller had stated at the Board’s February meeting.
The most significant addition to the Buena Vista City Public Schools elementary program after moving second grade classes will be the ability to properly accommodate students with physical and learning disabilities.
“[At] Kling, we’re going to have a self-contained room for our students with disabilities to work with them. [Director of Special Education] Mrs. [Juli] Gibson has been asking for that for a while, but we just didn’t have the space …” Superintendent Francis noted.
Moving second grade classes to join the third, fourth, and fifth grade students of Enderly will be a fairly simple procedure that will not require many modifications to Enderly, Francis told the Board.
The elementary school already has handicap chair lifts, fencing and gates, and there is no need for construction work. BVCPS would install an updated air-conditioning and heating system, it would lay some pavement to improve the grounds’ accessibility, and classrooms would be outfitted with updated technology, Francis explained.
When all is said and done, “it should be very comfortable. It should be more secure with the fencing and all of the things that we have in there now, so I don’t anticipate any issues with that,” he said.
School Board member Mac Felts, though, had concerns about security when adding more students to the district’s least secure school building.
“The way that school is designed it’s like an open canvas … That’s why we put the school security officer and the fencing, which are things that address it, now it doesn’t solve it,” Francis responded. “[Security has] been one of the major things we’ve talked about since day one. I would not feel comfortable about this move without the fencing and the SSO.”
Felts believes that the building design’s lack of security is “even more reason to have a consolidated elementary school [that is] self-contained.”
BVCPS administrators believe that this fall’s second-grade move will be a beneficial transition for both students and school employees.
Now, with the School Board’s approval, administrators will begin developing a schedule to meet with parents/ guardians of both schools and to get both school buildings ready to accommodate these changes for the start of the 2023-2024 school year.
