CPS mulls ways to address student growth at high schools

In Monday night’s Long-Range Facilities Planning Committee meeting, Columbia Public Schools officials had their first look at numbers put together by a consulting firm that laid out how the city of Columbia’s growth will affect capacity at all the schools in the district.

One thing that stuck out to committee chair and board member Jonathan Sessions was that by the 2029-2030 school year, all three of the traditional high schools will be at 100 percent capacity, plus an additional 13 percent. Sessions said that amounts to roughly 850 students.

“We’re talking about changing attendance areas in the district,” he told ABC 17 News on Tuesday. “But what I saw is [that], 11, 12 years from now, we’re overcapacity no matter how you balance our students.”

This doesn’t include what the district calls “release valves,” which include students leaving Rock Bridge High School to work at the Columbia Area Career Center. It also doesn’t include students at Douglass High School.

But the increase is still going to pose a problem, and the district is now in the very preliminary stages of looking at ways to address it.

“I think there are innovative things we can do,” said Randy Gooch, the chief operations officer

One of those innovations is an idea to work with a local community college and have high school students attend classes there to receive high school and college credit.

District leaders got the idea when they traveled to Ann Arbor, Michigan, on a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored leadership trip.

“We’ve begun exploring what might that look like,” said Superintendent Peter Stiepleman. “I look forward to talk more about that when we’re ready to actually say something.”

Stiepleman said at the meeting Monday that building a new high school could cost upward of $100 million, plus there would be costs in maintaining it.

“Not just to build it but to operate it with your teachers, your marching band, your football team, your principal — everything that goes into operating a building,” he said.

The district is just mulling over the ideas at this point, and there have been no decisions made or projects agreed upon.

A dialogue should take place in this community,” said Stiepleman. “Our job as a public school system is to respond to the community’s interests and needs.”

Sessions said the board won’t be surprised by this.

“This is a problem that’s 10 years from now and we’re paying attention to it,” he said. “This is just the beginning of our next 10-year plan.”