The rezoning issue is creating a rift between the City of Coral Springs and the Broward County School Board. Last week, the board voted to alleviate overcrowding at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by shifting 351 students from a Coral Springs neighborhood to Coral Glades High School.
Students who currently attend Douglas would be allowed to stay.
On Wednesday, the city commission sent the school board a letter strongly opposing its decision, saying in part, “Your decision to rezone for a single school, as opposed to a strategic regional approach that best meets the needs of all students, signals your lack of support for the City of Coral Springs.”
The letter reminds the board that the city provides school resource officers for 19 public schools and says the city will reevaluate its agreements with the school board.
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MSD has 3,500 students on a campus designed for 3,077. A student sent us a video showing jammed hallways and stairwells.
“It’s literally like a traffic jam, and the staircases are so narrow, everyone trying to walk down and up at the same time, it’s really hard,” said senior Maya Aharon.
That’s why some parents urged the school board at last week’s meeting to act quickly to alleviate the overcrowding.
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“We cannot push this along anymore, it’s just too dangerous for our children,” one mother said.
“It’s not easy teaching in an overcrowded school,” English teacher Sarah Lerner told us Friday. “The more students we have means the more essays we have to read, papers to take home, things to grade.”
“You know I have one elective that started out with 37 kids at the beginning of the year, it’s a lot, the noise level, it’s harder to get things done, harder to give students individual attention,” said Melissa Falkowski, who teaches English and journalism at MSD.
However, the school board’s solution has stirred up a hornet’s nest of opposition from parents. Jennifer Levi said she and her husband bought a house in the Hills neighborhood of Coral Springs assuming her kids would go to Douglas with the rest of their friends from elementary school.
“And then come to high school, just our area is going to be thrown to a new high school where she barely knows anyone, and everyone else from her elementary school gets to go to Douglas, so I have a lot of concerns about that,” Levi said. “This is a strategic plan for Parkland to boot out the Black kids and the lower socioeconomic kids and it’s not right.”
The school board’s plan would reduce the Black population at the school from 12% to 10% and would also significantly reduce the population of kids receiving free lunch.
“So whether or not they intend for it to look that way it does have the appearance like you’re removing a large percentage of diversity from the school,” Falkowski said, adding that she objects to the timing of the proposal because 8th graders have just visited the school to choose their electives, and now some of them will be told they’re not going to Douglas after all.
The board still has to give final approval to the rezoning plan in April.
