Paso Robles board votes to close elementary school. What happens to dual immersion program?
After more than three years of school district and community meetings, the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District’s Board of Trustees has decided to close an elementary school campus.
Georgia Brown Elementary School on 36th Street will close after the conclusion of the 2023-24 school year, according to the board’s 6-1 vote during a five-hour-long meeting on Tuesday. Trustee Sondra Williams was the sole dissenting vote.
The elementary school campus is the home of the district’s dual immersion Spanish-English language program. Per the board’s vote, the dual immersion program will be moved next year to either Daniel E. Lewis Middle School or George H. Flamson Middle School.
School district staff were directed by the board to create a pros and cons list of housing the dual immersion program at either middle school. That list was scheduled to be presented to the board at its Feb. 13 meeting.
The board also voted to reconfigure whichever middle school campus the dual immersion program will be hosted at from a sixth-through-eighth-grade campus into a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade campus. The middle school campus chosen to not host the dual immersion program will become a junior high with seventh and eighth grades, according to the board’s Tuesday vote.
Paso Robles’s five remaining elementary schools will host kindergarten through sixth grades beginning next year, instead of just kindergarten through fifth grade.
The decision to close Georgia Brown Elementary School came after the district attempted to remodel and save the dilapidated campus. But during site surveys last year, a seismic anomaly indicating a possible active earthquake fault under the campus derailed those remodel plans.
To help it decide the future of the campus and the dual immersion program, the district formed a 25-member advisory committee last fall to analyze enrollment data, grade span configuration options and community input. The committee then presented recommendations to the board during its Tuesday meeting, the top recommendation being to keep the dual immersion program at the Georgia Brown Elementary School campus.
Although the board voted to close Georgia Brown after the current academic year, board members indicated during the Tuesday meeting that the campus could potentially be used in the future, but the district must first conduct further studies to determine the best way forward given the presence of the possible earthquake fault.
During Tuesday’s discussion, Williams expressed her concern about the board’s majority vote given how quickly the district must transform its campuses to accommodate the new grade span configuration.
Williams requested the district provide “a lot of support for us who have students who are in the sixth grade going to stay at the elementary school level because that sounds like they’re not going to have an equitable education in six months.”
Her comment was met with applause from the audience.
At the beginning of the board’s discussion, president Nathan Williams noted how difficult the multi-year process that culminated in Tuesday’s decision has been.
“It’s been an extremely difficult process and where we end up on this is going to be tough in a lot of ways but hopefully we come out with a lot of good,” he said.
