Elementary ‘proximity plan’ honed to two options
The School Board of Lee County received the first of two updates regarding the new Elementary Proximity Plan this week.
The plan, intended to allow children to attend schools closer to home, includes two proposed alternative plans, or maps.
Planning Growth & Capacity Director Kathie Ebaugh said the current zone system is not functioning the way it did 20 years ago.
“Twenty years is a long period of time. Communities grow and change in 20 years. Zoning systems are dependent on student growth, location of schools, where to live. It should be evaluated at least every five to 10 years,” she said.
Community Engagement Coordinator Adam Molloy said the purpose of the new proximity plan is to offer stronger community-based choices, prioritize equity, inclusion and high quality education.
“The current system is extremely inefficient across the board. It is disconnected from the original intent,” he said. “It is not setting up our students and schools for success. The time is now to fix the system.”
The school district went to a three-zoned assigned system called School Choice in the wake of a court-ordered school equity plan more than two decades ago. Under the system, parents chose from among the schools within their zone and a lottery system then determines whether their child attends their first-, second- or third-ranked school. The district later modified the zones into subzones.
School Choice required substantial, lengthy, and costly busing.
The outcomes of the Elementary Proximity Plan are intended to create a better system for the community and future, have a connection between parents and the school, strengthen diversity at the elementary level and reinvest funds from transportation to schools.
The work on the plan began approximately a year and a half ago with presentations to the public sharing initial scenarios and receiving feedback in January.
“The public was great about pointing out things that we needed to fix and address,” Molloy said.
David Kaitz, with Davis Demographics, said there are many similarities in Map 1 and Map 4, the two plans that are moving forward.
Within Map 1, areas L and M, which make up the Lehigh Acres area, start out as one area due to only four schools being located between the two. As new schools are built, it may turn into another zone.
The larger areas, A, located in Cape Coral, D, located in the northern part of the district, and Q in the southern portion of the district may split into smaller areas as future schools not certain are built.
Within this plan, West Zone 3 (Gulf area), which currently has 11 choices, decreases to three elementary school choices. There was also a decrease in East Zone 1, the James Stephens area, from 12 choices to six choices.
The Map 4 option, includes a great deal of feedback from the community. Kaitz said the areas are uniformly small with the exception of D, which is the heart of Fort Myers, due to it being more than 100 square miles. He said other than that large area, most choices range from three to five schools, except for the island schools.
In area H of Map 4, James Stephens Academy is one of eight choices and Gulf Elementary is one of three choices for area F.
Other highlights of Map 4 include an expansion of area D further westward; expansion of area K northward, giving up part of its lower section to area J; area L expands northward; area M still has one school, but gives up portion of the west region to area J; area J expands more into Lehigh and should add two more elementary sites and area O expands further north and takes over lower two Fort Myers schools.
Staff recommends Map 4 as it is a product of the collective community.
The proposed zone alternatives reduces the average length of a bus route from 61.1 minutes to 45.56 minutes with an average distance per route going from 22.33 miles to 17.75 miles. In addition, the number of elementary routes would decrease from 525 to 444 for an estimated savings of $5,463,000.
The current sub zones cover 814 square miles district wide with 49 elementary schools, with the potential of five more. Currently the highest number of choices for elementary schools takes place in the East Zone 2 with 17 choices, South Zone 2 with 15 choices and West Zone 2 with 14 choices, all with busing options.
Ebaugh said three of their zones have more than 100 square miles, which includes South Zone 3 with 139 square miles, East Zone 2 with 129 square miles and East Zone 3 with 120 square miles.
As far as the size of the current subzones, the three largest zones are East 2 with 6,842 K-5 resident counts, West 2 with 5,036 K-5 resident counts and the South 1 with 6,692 K-5 resident counts.
“All subzones have more than 1,500 students given that our elementary schools have between 500 to 1,000 students,” Ebaugh said.
She said with the district selecting schools based on land, rather than the need of students, it has created a disproportionate number of schools in some areas where they are located very close together. For example, Ebaugh said in the East Zone there is Lehigh Elementary School, G Weaver Hipps, Veterans Park and the future Elementary J school all located within two miles of each other.
“The farthest distance is from G Weaver Hipps to the future elementary J and it is five miles,” Ebaugh said. “In the west, Skyline and Patriot are a third of a mile from each other and additional schools within a five to seven radius.”
Due to the choices and locations of schools, the school district has a high number of bus routes, one of the largest in the entire state of Florida. With a reduced number of routes, the current shortage of bus drivers would decrease.
“Transportation becomes a major challenge for us. While the cost is very high and among the highest in the state of Florida with an estimate of $7,000 per route, the average number of bus stops on each route is 15. Most is 25 on routes,” Ebaugh said.
Due to the number of routes, the average time a student is on a bus is an hour one way to school. The longest bus ride is 143 minutes one way.
“They are spending over four hours a day in a bus,” Ebaugh said.
The presentation further broke down how far away students are bused to the elementary schools. One of the examples given was south of Lee Boulevard, which has 625 students in the area that attend 21 different elementary schools and are transported by 15 different buses. Ten of those schools are more than 9 miles away, one is 13 and another is 17 miles away.
For Gulf Elementary School, some students travel as far as 13 miles away as 285 students attend from an adjacent zone. For West Zone 3, families can choose up to 11 schools and students are traveling as far away as Burnt Store into the East Fort Myers and Bayshore area.
“We aren’t saying that this plan was a bad plan. It probably was a good plan 20 years ago. We as a community have changed,” Ebaugh said. “Lee County is not growing proportionately. There is six times as much growth happening at the over 65 (year) level than there is at under 18 (year) level.”
She said an area may be growing, but the district has to focus on the 18 year old and under population. From 2010 to 2021 the total growth in Lee County was about 14,000 people 18 and younger. Broken down more, growth in the West Zone was 660 people 18 and younger, 4,000 in the East Zone and more than 7,000 in the South Zone.
The presentation also looked in the current FSA test scores by score level, sub zone and ethnicity.
“The problem is that it is completely masking what is happening at schools,” Molloy said, as students “are not being evenly distributed among schools in the sub zones. If you look at the large pool, we have currently 29 intensely, or at risk segregated schools.”
He gave an example of school A having 60 percent of its third graders proficient in testing, while school B, less than two miles away, had 17 percent proficient. He said the diversity is there at the elementary schools, but the true picture is being masked.
The second part of the proximity plan presentation will be discussed at the school board’s Aug. 30 meeting.
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