January 19, 1997
The Anne Arundel school board will hold the following hearings on proposals to redraw school attendance areas in four sections of the county.
All hearings will begin at 6: 30 p.m. They are:
For the Chesapeake and Northeast feeder systems, the hearing will be Feb. 24 at Northeast High School. The school board is considering removing from George Fox Middle School the students who live in the Riviera Beach Elementary attendance area and part of the Sunset Elementary area. Instead, those 270 children would attend Chesapeake Bay Middle School, but would return to Northeast High for grades nine through 12.
Also, the board wants to clarify the boundary for a small area of Sunset Elementary, where six children wrongly have been attending Sunset and going on to Chesapeake Bay Middle. This proposal would allow them to continue at those schools.
For the Meade area schools, the hearing will be Feb. 27 at Meade High School. The school board has proposed changes to attendance boundaries for Brock Bridge, Maryland City, Meade Heights, Manor View, Harman and Jessup elementary schools.
At the middle school level, the board will open a second middle school. Proposed attendance areas for the new Meade Middle are the 1,067 students who live in the areas of Brock Bridge, Jessup, Meade Heights, Severn and Van Bokkelen elementaries. Staying at MacArthur Middle would be the 885 children in the attendance areas of Harman, Manor View, Maryland City, Pershing Hill and West Meade elementaries.
Under construction now, a larger Meade Heights elementary, with capacity for 559 children, will open this fall. The new middle school will not open until midyear, and students will be transferred there in phases.
For the Southern feeder system, the hearing will be March 3 at Southern High School. The board has proposed alleviating crowding at Tracey's Elementary by moving 63 students to Deale Elementary, which is nearby. No hearing is needed for Superintendent Carol S. Parham's plan to shift the eighth grade out of crowded Southern Middle School and into the high school until the school system increases middle school capacity, whether by an addition to the middle school or by building a second middle school for the area. About 374 eighth-graders would move to the high school.
For the Annapolis area elementary schools, the hearing will be March 5 at Annapolis Middle School. The board is considering changes that would unify some neighborhoods from which children are sent to several schools and move other children closer to home.
The school board will vote on the proposals in April. Most would start with the coming school year.
Pub Date: 1/19/97
