The Beginning of an End

The wait is over. After two years of developing the new PPS High School System, on Monday April 26th, 2010, Superintendent Carole Smith released the recommendations for the High School Redesign. The 87 page plan is quite thorough, stating eight current schools would become community high schools: Cleveland, Franklin, Grant, Jefferson, Lincoln, Madison, Roosevelt and Wilson. What is a community school? Community schools will offer the same core academics programs and a broad range of electives across the district with slight variations. This makes schools equal to each other in terms of the classes offered to students, while still preserves a little wiggle-room for individuality.
Other key components of the recommendation include Marshall High School’s conversion to a focus site. A focus school will provide students to “go deep” in key interest areas, such as the arts or business. At the end of the 2010-2011 year, Renaissance Arts, BizTech, and Pauling will close to be replaced by 3 to 4 new focus options with extensive programming. In fall 2011, the Marshall focus schools would open with 300 to 1,100 PPS students attending.
In fall 2011, Benson will become an advanced learning center for career-related and technical learning experiences available for juniors and seniors across the district. PPS students can apply to spend half their school day or a week at Benson and the remainder of the day/week at their community school. Sounds like the best of both worlds; attending your community schools and focus school.
What does all this mean for Franklin? Franklin will stay a community school with class options taken away and replaced with new ones. Sophomore Bethany Moua says, “I like that Franklin is not closing, because I like Franklin.” Franklin will be receiving new staff members as well as some being transferred to other schools. Because of the new attendance boundaries, students living in the Lane Middle School and Bridger, Lent and Marysville K-8 schools areas will attend Franklin beginning the fall 2011. This will increase to a projected enrollment of 1,318 students. In response to the news that students from Marshall will be becoming part of the Franklin community, junior Steven Faughn simply responded, “Better them than us.” But remember, the current proposed High School Plan is a recommendation, not the final product until finalized by the PPS board in mid June.

by Erika Schmidt