School board considers options for Jackson Community School
File photo
Jackson Community School — Jackson County’s alternative learning center — is the most expensive school in the district per pupil, and now the Board of Education is considering whether it should invest more money into the aging building or relocate the small student population into a larger school.
“We want to serve students, that’s what our business is about,” said Superintendent Dana Ayers. “We also have a fiscal responsibility.”
The conversation around Jackson Community School came about in part because the building, which was constructed in the mid 1950s, is in need of a new HVAC system. The whole repair will cost the school system around $450,000.
Enrollment at the school is currently at the lowest point it has ever been, according to Ayers, with 48 students. Of those, 44 are high school students and four are middle school students. The school is set to receive two additional middle school students in January. Ten years ago, the school was serving 102 students.
“That number has declined over time and we collectively as a curriculum team and a leadership team are trying to figure out why or what we can do to address that,” said Ayers. “Our board also has an obligation to consider the cost and financial benefit to operate a school with less than 50 students.”
The goal of Jackson Community School is to serve students who learn better in an alternate setting, or those that have been suspended or expelled from other schools.
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“The community school is an alternative model that doesn’t have one set student that they’re looking for,” said Ayers. “It is trying to find what we need to serve the students that we have and there’s no cookie cutter model for that.”
For middle school students, there are two ways to get to Jackson Community School; either a student’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) team places them there, or they can be moved to the school via superintendent placement.
“Sometimes there are students who have severe needs or they are involved with law enforcement and there is a reason that they need to be placed in an alternative setting,” said Ayers. “Those students, middle school students, don’t choose to go to Jackson Community School.”
High school students are different. They can choose to attend the school, and there are many who choose that path. They can also be placed there by the superintendent, or they can be placed there by the Supporting Successful Transitions team, which meets every six weeks and consists of school counselors, principals, director of mental health, assistant superintendent, deputy superintendent, student support services director and school social workers.
There are currently 17 full-time staff members and three part-time staff members working at Jackson Community School, some of whom work shared positions with other schools in the system.
Jackson Community School is far and away the most expensive school for the school system to operate relative to student population. Jackson County Schools spends about $13,500-$14,000 per student annually, though this number varies by school.
For students at Jackson Community School, the school system is spending about $37,271 annually per pupil. The next highest per-pupil spending rate is at Blue Ridge School, at $26,586. Both Jackson County and Blue Ridge early colleges cost the school system about $21,000 per pupil. At the rest of the schools in the school system, per pupil spending is well below $20,000, with the lowest at Fairview Elementary and Smoky Mountain High School where per pupil spending is just over $10,000.
Actual per pupil spending at each school is determined by annual salary costs for staff within a school, combined with annual operation costs, divided by the student population. For Jackson Community School, which has annual operational costs on par with schools in the county — about $2 million a year — but far fewer students, per pupil spending is higher than at any other school.
In a presentation to the board at its Dec. 17 meeting, Ayers outlined three potential options for Jackson Community School. The first would be to keep running the school in the same location in the same format as it exists right now.
The second option would be to relocate Jackson Community School to the campus of Smoky Mountain High School for the high school students that make up a majority of the student population and relocate the middle school students to Smokey Mountain Elementary.
The third option would be to remain on sight and revitalize the strategies for an alternative school model.
“When I say that, revitalization, I’m thinking of something that’s going to make students want to come to school,” said Ayers. “What is it that we can do to entice students to come there so that we can support them and be a success with them.”
Regardless of what decision the board makes for Jackson Community School, Ayers said she believes that the middle school students at JCS should be placed in an alternative learning model at Smokey Mountain Elementary School.
“I feel like our middle school kiddos are really missing out on some impacts that they could have if they continued to be in a really small setting,” said Ayers. “The way it would look for those students because they are on an alternative model would be vastly different than the way it looks at the high school level.”
Eventually, when the new middle school is built , that is where the alternative program will be housed for middle school students.
Relocation for the high school JCS students into Smoky Mountain High School would require a lot of shifting classroom space to accommodate an appropriate space. The school board recently tried to relocate the Catamount School — a laboratory school run by Western Carolina University — out of SMHS and into a different school building due to lack of available space. The Catamount School chose instead to move onto the campus of WCU.
Additional Southwestern Community College classes and two JROTC classrooms at the high school were part of the cause for dwindling space.
Ayers said that if the board decides to move JCS to the campus of Smoky Mountain High School, it will be important that the classrooms are close together.
“I want JCS to still have an identity,” said Ayers. “We will keep their school code, and it will be important for them as staff that they are able to work together and not be disjointed.”
If JCS were to relocate to the high school campus, JCS students could have dual enrollment and access many of the classes at the high school that are not currently available at the community school.
“They would have offerings that they don’t have on their current campus,” Ayers said.
Board member Kim Moore brought up another positive possibility for JCS operating on the high school campus.
“Sometimes when you don’t see things, you don’t feel like you can reach it,” Moore said. “Coming here would give them the opportunity to see, ‘if I can transition back into SMHS, or if I can transition out of alternative, I could start playing sports again, I could start doing other things again.’”
But Ayers also noted that not every student at JCS is looking to move back into a traditional learning setting.
“There are students who are placed there or choose to go there because they have experienced trauma in their life and they appreciate having the more individualized attention because there [JCS] they’re a little collective group,” said Ayers. “I don’t want it to come across that every student is there because they’ve been placed there because they’ve done something, because that’s absolutely not the case.”
Board Member Lynn Dillard worked in Jackson County Schools and was one of the staff who wrote the grant to create Jackson Community School at the outset. She said the school was originally formed to attract students who had become disengaged with their regular instructional process.
“How are we going to bring those people back in and make it exciting? So, we changed the whole instructional program; hands on, hands on, hands on,” said Dillard. “It takes a lot of work to accommodate those kinds of kids and keep them excited about coming to school.”
Dillard said the school was a “thriving” place.
“It stopped when they started sending all the kids from the school system who had been suspended, and they had to stay in a room and be quiet all day and then leave and go home,” Dillard said. “That’s when it really became a behavioral adjustment place, and I was very much against that.”
Chairman Wes Jamison noted that while the school system is spending more per pupil on JCS students than at any other school in the system, an alternative school might be the kind of thing that should cost the school system more money.
“It just shows it does take a little more to get some students to a certain point in education than it does others,” said Jamison. “To me this is not a determining factor in whether or not we relocate that school.”
In public comment during the Dec. 17 school board meeting, three people spoke in public comment in support of Jackson Community School.
Jessica Blankenship had a child graduate from JCS at the end of last school year.
“If he would’ve stayed here at the high school, I don’t know where he would be,” said Blankenship. “They [JCS] took the time to get to know their kids one on one. He could not function in a classroom, in a normal setting, period. It didn’t matter.”
Blankenship said her child had an IEP and that when the school system realized he wasn’t successful in the classroom setting, her child was moved to JCS by superintendent decision.
“At 17 years old, he’s a high school graduate thanks to them,” Blankenship said. “Because if it was not for them, he may not be here. We don’t know. He would’ve been a drop out. But we couldn’t ask for a better school.”
“Integrating them back in a big building, I don’t think would be beneficial because you can’t take somebody who can’t function in a regular classroom and put them in the middle of a school and expect them to function,” Blankenship continued. “Not all kids are black and white. The world is not black and white. We have a lot of rainbow kids that… you’ll never fit them in a square box and that’s what needs to be known and seen and they [JCS] make sure that happens for these kids that need it.”
If the school were to be relocated, Ayers said she could confirm that all JCS staff members would still have a job with Jackson County Public Schools.
The school board plans to take more than a month to consider its options for Jackson Community School. No decision will be on the table until at least the February school board meeting. In the meantime, board members have asked members of the public to share their thoughts on the topic and take part in the community discussion.
