Fair Park to Remain a High School

It looks like the idea to merge Fair Park and Booker T. Washington High Schools has been officially abandoned. More details are provided below in this Times article. Thanks to Johnny Jones for bringing this article to my attention.
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Caddo to take up school consolidation proposal
May 31, 2007

By Melody Brumble
mbrumble@gannett.com

Caddo School Board members will decide June 19 whether to consolidate Central and Ingersoll elementary schools in Shreveport and create a center for over-age students at Ingersoll Elementary.

The School Board also will consider whether or how to change attendance zones to send more J.S. Clark Middle School students to Booker T. Washington High School, where enrollment has dwindled. About half of J.S. Clark Middle students are zoned into Booker T. Washington High. Most of the rest are zoned into Fair Park High School. A handful who live in the Highland neighborhood are zoned into Byrd High School.

The changes would occur at the beginning of the 2008-09 school year; school officials would start planning for the changes this year if the board approves them.

A committee of members recommended by the School Board and community groups discussed the issues almost a year before nailing down recommendations in April. The committee approved the final recommendations Wednesday.

Discussion about how to boost Booker T. Washington High's enrollment led to the committee. In 2006, School Board members turned down a plan to take a part of Fair Park High's attendance zone for Booker T. Washington High. Last fall, Fair Park High supporters protested a suggestion to merge that school with Booker T. Washington High and turn Fair Park High into a campus for kindergarten through eighth grade.

The Fair Park-Booker T. Washington merger was among suggestions Caddo schools Superintendent Ollie Tyler offered to the committee early on. She and committee members let that idea die.

Another suggestion to merge an elementary school with Linear Middle School in the Martin Luther King Jr. neighborhood also got scrapped, as did creation of a prekindergarten center in that Shreveport neighborhood. The center would have occupied the vacant elementary school.

Instead of a center, Tyler and staff members will open prekindergarten classes at schools throughout the parish through the state-funded prekindergarten program in the coming year.

Wanda Gunn, Caddo schools' chief academic officer, said the district will serve more than 200 4-year-olds in those classes.