Arlington Public Schools staff are recommending the School Board form a task force to explore how school enrollment can be shifted to prevent overcrowding.
School staff will make the recommendation to the board at its Jan. 4 meeting. The recommendations call for the task force to present its findings to the School Board next October, following the release of enrollment figures and projections for 2007. Assistant Superintendent for Administrative Services Meg Tuccillo said there are not yet serious problems with overcrowding. She said the goal of the task force is to anticipate overcrowding problems in advance and make enrollment decisions to prevent them.
“We’re looking to confront the problem before it gets bigger,” Tuccillo said. “Rather than looking to build a new school when we have available seating, we’re working with staff” to determine if students can be shifted to different schools.
The task force “would look at enrollment and capacity at an elementary school identified to be overcrowded, and look for what the solution would be to better balance things out,” she said.
Tuccillo said recent projections that show a stabilizing of school enrollment after four years of decline could contribute to the need to consider an enrollment realignment, especially in northern Arlington, where growth has been seen in school-age population. She said the task force should work to determine why enrollment has steadied.
“Our first priority is to find out [how many preschool students] are out there,” she said. “We recommend doing a survey where we’re experiencing the most growth” to determine if preschoolers will attend public schools.
School staff also recommends immediate steps to deal with overcrowding at two schools. They suggestshifting the pre-kindergarten special-education class at Tuckahoe Elementary School to a new location and combining the McKinley Elementary pre-kindergarten special-education class with another similar class.
