Decatur students in trailers; administrators in school

“Anyone who is familiar with Westchester can see it’s a school built for children,” said Emily Kandetzki, who has four children in Decatur schools. “It’s heart-wrenching to walk into a classroom and see them filled with big black leather chairs and administrators.”

Westchester was built as an elementary school, complete with bathrooms in each classroom, brightly colored walls, cubbies and low-hanging hooks. A playground sits on a large grassy field.

The small district will use 10 trailers this school year while it finishes construction of a new school at the site of the former Fifth Avenue school, communications director Bruce Roaden said.

The new school, which is slated to open in Aug. 2011, will be for fourth and fifth graders. Renovations are also under way at the middle and high schools.

“The new school will take pressure off the other schools,” Roaden told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Our goal is that there will be no need to use trailers next year.”

Next year, students will be redistricted to fill the new school.

“It just doesn’t’ make sense to bus all the kids over here [to Westchester] now,” Roaden said.

The district currently houses about 40 administrators at Westchester, including the superintendent, school registration officials and payroll.

Roaden said that it would cost about $300,000 a year to lease space in Decatur for the administration.

“We couldn’t fit all of the central office in one portable,” he said. “It’s about one centralized location for parents to get service.”

Moving students back into Westchester would also require an additional expense, board member Julie Rhame said.

“We don’t have a library there or a cooking staff. There would need to be a principal and it would just raise costs,” she said.

It’s cheaper to put the students in trailers. At $625 a month, the district is slated to spend $75,000 this year on trailers for students.

“Of course there’s a lot of frustration in the community. They say they share our desire about trailers going away, but we don’t have a lot of details,” said Don Calder, who has two students at Clairemont Elementary. “To them, trailers are an inexpensive way of addressing the capacity issue.”

In 2003, the school system closed two schools, including Westchester, because of a decline in enrollment. They got rid of traditional elementary schools with kindergarten-5th grade and housed a few grades together in one building.

Since then enrollment has grown from 2,500 to 3,100 students. To accommodate the growth, the district – like many in metro Atlanta – has added trailers outside school buildings.

Frustration escalated this summer when the school announced plans to house 60 pre-kindergarten students in trailers at College Heights.

While the trailers have helped with overcrowded classrooms, they haven’t alleviated the burden on the schools, said Tammie Cummings, a mother of two.

The school’s library, cafeteria and gyms are still crowded. Last year, students had to be evacuated after sewage backed up into one of the trailers.

“The system was overloaded,” Cummings said. “You can’t just add trailers onto a school. The carpets were cleaned, but you still have little kids sitting on the floor.”

Cummings argues that the trailers also have poor circulation and ventilation, causing her children to get sick more often.

“My daughter got every cold, every bug last year. There’s poor circulation, so the germs just went around to each kid,” she said.

Roaden insists the trailers, which are fully heated and air conditioned, have the same amenities as a classroom.

“They are no different than a regular classroom,” Roaden said. “And we’re no different than any district in the area.”

Schools with trailers

Oakhurst: 1

Glennwood: 3

Clairemont: 1

Winnona Park: 3

College Heights: 3

Source: City Schools of Decatur