Letter: Irby Elementary should remain open
Letter to the editor
Open letter to the School Board of Alachua County:
Let me preface this email by saying: Thank you to Ms. Rockwell, Dr. McNealy, and Ms. Plavac for advocating WITH and FOR Irby. Their kind and, frankly, NON-RUDE responses to teachers, parents, and community members have not fallen on deaf ears!
The act of civility and decorum within their emails has allowed the people they represent to engage in healthy and much-needed dialogue. We have been sharing your responses with one another, and we are widely spread throughout the cities of Alachua and Gainesville.
Parents, teachers, and the community will be at Irby Elementary at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, March 10th, for an informational community meeting. We hope many school board members will be there, too! Mainly because Mr. Chairman Vu started responding to our emails on Friday (3/6) with questions about Irby, but I only see him getting answers to those questions… if and when he steps on our campus and walks around!
In his response to me, he stated, “I don’t think Irby can accommodate growth for a PreK-4th,” but I know the people of this city who watched this school be built. Many of those people attended and now work at this school and in the community.
I know they have said over and over again that Irby was built to be a K-5 school. Irby is also not landlocked. Nor is Irby next to protected land, like Mebane. So I was surprised to hear that statement made by Vu. Not too long ago, JBPro proposed 2 options for that as well, so they seemed to think Irby could be a K-5 school as well! In fact, they should know, or they wouldn’t have proposed it TWICE.
Mr. Chairman Vu was the one who brought up Option D, and as he said in that same email to me, “The ‘Grand K-8’ for Alachua was my idea, so the buck with that should stop with me.”
Yet your colleagues have written the following to their constituents!
Member Sarah Rockwell: “I absolutely agree with you. The current pk-8 plan does not make sense given the age of the buildings and the upcoming new development in Alachua. I will continue to advocate for keeping Irby open at pk-3 or 4.”
Member Janine Plavac: “I still remain firm in advocating for Irby and I appreciate your passion.”
Member Leanetta McNealy: “I worked at Irby as a principal intern under principal Dr. Christine Hirsch for about five months. It was one of my best experiences as an educator. Please know that I care about Irby Elementary.”
I can only hope that what you say is true. On Thursday, I hope you go back and see that Irby should remain open, along with Mebane, and recognize that the proposal to do so was already laid out for you.
Shernee Bellamy-Fults, Gainesville
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I don’t understand the rationale behind closing Irby which is decades newer than Alachua Elementary. Throw in there’s more population around Irby than there is the much older Alachua Elementary and one can’t help but wonder where the SBAC is receiving their marching orders.
The latest plan for closing both AES and IrbyES doesn’t make any sense.
It’s understandable why some schools should close since there’s excess capacity. Thus the earlier versions of the maps closed AES, put most of the lower grades in Irby, and added some overflow to make MebaneMS K8, a la the plan for Oak View (for a different reason), and the long existing HSCS.
During the discussions about the 2nd iteration maps, (and I was there and also made some remarks myself during citizen input), Chairman Vu made his suggestion to close Irby, too.
Brainstorming is good. But this proposal should fail. While he has concerns that parts of Mebane need updating, do that, if needed. But expanding Mebane to the scale needed to replace Irby doesn’t make sense if the original problem was too much underused capacity.
I agree, none of it makes any sense at all. I’m curious to see with all the new housing developments that are being built in Alachua, where all these children will fit. I could understand expanding all schools honestly, but closing 2 of the 3 down is absolutely ridiculous