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| Stockton Record, Sunday, July 14, 2002 |
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| SCHOOL NUMBERS TO JUMP - Small Tracy districts' enrollments to soar |
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TRACY -- Workers began pouring concrete at Lammersville Elementary School last week, laying the foundation for big changes coming to this tiny, one-campus district.
Sometime early next year, trucks will deliver nine portable classrooms to the K-8 school to house the first wave of students from the massive Mountain House development east of Tracy.
The Mountain House kids eventually will attend their own neighborhood school. But until it's built, their numbers could boost Lammersville's average enrollment of just 280 students to 460 in a single school year.
And that's just the beginning.
Lammersville and nearby Banta school districts stand on the precipice of massive enrollment growth, fueled by subdivisions planned for farmland and fields within their longtime rural boundaries.
Lammersville will serve the 9,000 to 10,000 schoolchildren generated by Mountain House's 12 planned neighborhoods over the next 20 years. Banta, also a one-school district, could add 8,000 new students to its current enrollment of 300 if the city of Lathrop, as expected, approves the 11,000-home River Islands development.
Such growth brings the potential for new state-of-the-art schools in districts that are more than 100 years old. More students mean more teachers with more specialties, expanded course offerings and bigger budgets. "You can't help but get better facilities," Banta Superintendent Bill Lebo said, "and I think you'll have a much better educational system."
But the projected influx of new students also makes some current residents uneasy. At tiny Banta and Lammersville, parents know everyone on campus by name, from the teachers to the principal to the custodian. Crime is almost nonexistent. Test scores are good. The communities pack their school gyms for recitals and basketball games.
Will new students change all that?
"I think the community is probably apprehensive of what (growth) is going to do to our small, rural school," Lammersville Trustee Stewart Easton said.
Although neighboring school districts such as Manteca and Tracy have experienced enormous growth, Banta and Lammersville are still the exception to the norm among California's rural schools. Many rural districts have seen their enrollments decline as retirees move to the Sierra foothills and young families leave in search of jobs or more affordable housing. "They're in a very unique situation," James Morante, a spokesman for the California School Boards Association, said of Banta and Lammersville.
While Morante noted that fast-growing districts can struggle to accommodate hundreds of new students, the two districts' superintendents say they have worked with developers to ensure that adequate facilities will be built.
But the sheer size of the new student population will require changes in the basic ways the two districts do business. Banta and Lammersville are both elementary school districts, geared to serve only students in kindergarten through the eighth grade.
Lammersville leaders already have decided to expand their district to serve high school students as well. A new high school eventually will house 2,500 to 2,800 students.
Banta also is considering adding high school grades. Trustees there will eventually have to choose whether to expand their district to cover high school students or to partner with Tracy Unified, which already serves high school students from neighboring elementary districts such as Banta.
Banta Superintendent William Draa envisions the construction of three K-12 campuses, each with a different theme such as the environment, sports and the performing arts.
New duties will require new staff, perhaps a director of curriculum, a finance specialist or a staff-development coordinator. Those are titles now filled mostly by Lebo and Draa, who, in addition to being superintendents, also oversee tasks such as teacher hiring, discipline and scheduling. "It's a lot to keep everybody going in the same direction," Draa said.
But the small staff size also gives parents the chance to air their concerns with school leaders directly. At least one trustee is likely to be a friend or neighbor living nearby. "If we have issues, we can go to the superintendent or the principal or the teachers," said Stacy Hughes, president of the Banta Parent Faculty Association. "We all work together."
A portion of kids at both schools attend via intradistrict transfers from larger districts, but many are the children or grandchildren of farmers, farm workers or others in agriculture -- some of whom attended Banta and Lammersville themselves.
Both schools are home to thriving 4-H clubs. Banta is bordered by an enormous alfalfa field. Signs at Lammersville advise visitors that horseback riding is prohibited on school grounds.
Traditions are cherished, and schools focus on the basics. Students in the seventh and eighth grades have just one teacher, while their peers in bigger districts often change classrooms several times a day. Neither school offers a foreign-language class to older students.
Just how -- or if -- the districts will be able to hang on to their rural roots is a topic residents debate. "Many of the (Mountain House) buyers, if not most, will be folks from the other side of the Atlamont," Lebo said. "They will have different expectations from what Lammersville now provides."
That could translate into a push for expanded music programs or a foreign-language course for eighth-graders. "They may challenge us to do better," Trustee Easton said.
For now, there are no plans beyond the new portables at Lammersville to make big changes to either school site. Both superintendents say they intend, however, to make sure opportunities at the current campuses are equal to those at the new ones. "It's nice to be small," Draa said. "But if you're not meeting today's needs and demands, smallness means nothing."
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