WINTER SPRINGS, Fla. – Parents in the Winter Springs Village neighborhood don't want their Keeth Elementary School students rezoned, and they wrote a 15-page rebuttal to the Seminole County School District to prove their points.
“We don't want this to be an us vs. them scenario so that's why we've invested the time and the research and sharing the information with them,” mom Treva Marhsall said.
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Seminole County School District introduced a plan to ease overcrowding. They plan to reopen Longwood Elementary School, which closed six years ago. In return, about 1,000 students from several schools, including Highlands, Lake Mary, Keeth, Layer, Winter Springs and Woodlands elementary schools, would be moved around.
Marshall's daughter could possibly be sent to Layer. She said the rezoned school is lower performing, twice as far, causes traffic concerns and dismantles all the work parents put into Keeth to make it a higher-rated school.
“Those are things that we as a community have built and that's what happens when you have a neighborhood school and that's what's being taken away from us,” Marshall said.
Neighbor Ann Russolese agrees and is also fighting the district about their decision. She has two children at Keeth and thinks part of the decision boils down to money -- the Winter Springs neighborhood has more, and enrolled students could help change demographics.
“We're being targeted so that we can make up for the mistakes of the school board and go over to bring our dollars into Layer to make that school great," Russolese said.
In a statement, the district said that is not the case.
“Re-opening Longwood Elementary is a tremendous cost-savings to the tax-payers of Seminole County, as remodeling this pre-existing site (Longwood Elementary) is vastly less expensive than building a brand new elementary school. Even if a new school were built, the district would still have to do a rezoning process to populate it,” it said.
There will be a meeting held on Jan. 17 about the rezoning, and a vote will happen Jan. 24.