After years of tackling public fears about school closings, Duval County Public Schools administrators are struggling to sell a positive in plans for building a new, much larger Venetia Elementary School on Jacksonville’s Westside.
“This is a large piece of property. There are opportunities to do some cool things,” Chief Operations Officer Jim Culbert told about 100 people at a Thursday, July 16, community meeting.
Culbert tried to steer the talk toward the positive, asking what the group cared about in a school. He suggested perennial favorites like art and music, but the predominant care shouted back to him was “traffic!”
The 1942-vintage school, in an older neighborhood off Timuquana Road east of Roosevelt Boulevard, has held 400 or fewer children in recent years. Now, neighbors fear crowded roads, burdened drainage and other impacts from a plan to replace the original Venetia with a building that school officials say will be designed for 1,200 kids.
The larger building fits a school district vision for operating more efficiently, cutting payrolls by needing fewer school secretaries and managers overall without paring back the number of teachers in classrooms. Having about 750 students has been seen as a break-even point where the per-pupil funding a school receives can pay to operate the building.
“We have a really large number of schools that are … small,” Deputy Superintendent Corey Wright told people at the meeting, held at the now-closed Hyde Grove Elementary School.
Wright said the school district has elementary schools running well at close to the planned Venetia’s size, pointing to New Berlin, Bartram Springs and Chet’s Creek elementaries.
But many details haven’t been worked out for the new Venetia, and critics said a lack of transparency is adding to their misgivings.
Neighbor Susan Donnell said she and some friends made and distributed about 1,000 flyers announcing the July 16 community meeting but said about 30% of the people she talked to knew nothing at all about plans to replace the school.
The School Board adopted a repair and “right-sizing” plan in 2019 ― ahead of a referendum where voters approved a half-penny sales tax for schools ― that included closing Ortega Elementary and consolidating its students into Venetia.
Ortega is still operating, but this month the School Board discussed, and ultimately delayed, voting on a resolution declaring it surplus property ahead of a scheduled August 2028 shutdown.
Venetia and Ortega together total fewer than 1,200 students, and Wright told people at the meeting that new attendance boundaries for an enlarged Venetia aren’t expected to be completed until January.
Details about new school’s look weren’t available either, as Culbert told people the new Venetia is still being designed.
The meeting ended with both sides still wanting something from the other, as the school district encouraged people to complete a survey about what they’d like in the next Venetia. The survey will end in about a week, the crowd was told.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: DCPS meeting on new Venetia Elementary has doubters, not details
Reporting by Steve Patterson, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Steve Patterson, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union | USA TODAY Network
