Please join us at tonight's countywide forum on the subject of the proposed systemwide school rezoning.

FYI, this event will NOT take the form of a rally, nor will it speak to any community-specifc concerns attendees may bring.

Instead, the thrust of the program to be delivered is three-fold: To assert that the proposal does not satisfy Knox County Schools' stated goals of problems to be remedied through systemwide rezoning, to assert that the process chosen by KCS has been exclusionary, and to question how it is that KCS has come to this unprecedented conclusion that it is the task of the school system to "chase" undirected residential development.

Join us, then, at the time and place Randy shares above.

Hello. My name is Chris Atkins. My family lives on East Beaver Creek Drive, and we are slated to be rezoned to Central High School unless we can convince our school board members otherwise. We were unable to attend the meeting at the Expo Center yesterday, but I was wondering if you could give us a report about how the meeting went. Was it well attended? Were attendees from different areas well united (a key if we want to defeat this proposed rezoning)?

We did attend the meeting at Powell High School on Tuesday. My wife (who is a Knox County teacher) spoke briefly and asked why the schools that are failing NCLB standards were being fed MORE students. I strongly believe this is bad policy and counter productive in trying to improve those schools.

For the record, we have three children (10 years, 7 years, and 16 months) who are not about to enter high school, but this rezoning still effects us dramatically. Central High School is more than twice as long a drive as Powell from our house and requires crossing dangerous Broadway, while we can get to Powell using only easy backroads (just Beaver Creek to Brickyard and enter through the back entrance).

I have not had an opportunity to sign any kind of petition against this rezoning proposal (although my wife has), nor have I filled out any kind of survey. I would be happy to do this, or whatever else I can do to try to help stop this haphazard rezoning.

Anyone who wants to contact me via email regarding this is welcome.

Thanks!

Chris Atkins
trion231@yahoo.com

Chris -

I believe the forum was a success; over 100 people showed up and many of them signed up to participate in a new process. It had a completely different format than all the other forums in that the organizers decided to collect opinions from the audience only via the survey and encouraged them to join together to ask the school board for a new, inclusive process.

The other forums were basically just one parent after another standing up to say why they didn't like the plan and how it was going to affect little Johnny or little Susie. Not very productive in terms of effecting a change by the school board.

The thrust of the message was that the reason we are in the predicament of having a new high school that no one wants to go to is because of a lack of participation and buy-in on the front-end by parents and residents. To avoid much of the controversy of the high school rezonings (and upcoming elementary and middle school rezonings), the board should scrap the plan (instead of all the tweaking currently ongoing) and start over with ALL the options on the table, and with the enthusiastic participation of area residents.

Many other rezoning processes exist out there where other counties have wrestled with the problem of managing school zones. There are a lot of ideas that could include open zoning, turning HVHS into a new kind of magnet, making it a school for grades 9 and 10 and turning Farragut into grades 11 and 12, making it a new middle school, making a "school within a school" etc.

You can get on the mailing list, see the meeting agenda and review the powerpoint presentation from the meeting at the knoxschools.info web site. Send an e-mail to info@knoxschools.info if you want to get involved with specific actions to stop the current plan.