S ome $22 million to $23 million. An undefined amount of which will go toward the construction of a high school.
The news is exciting, even if plans for the end result are still in the oven.
On Tuesday, there was a communitywide meeting at the Pine Bluff Convention Center during which it was announced that the Pine Bluff School District was in partnership with the state and that a potful of money was involved.
The idea for a new high school, according to Superintendent Barbara Warren, extends back to before anyone was having a discussion about Dollarway being annexed into Pine Bluff. And the way it was described is that any additional square feet created would have to be offset by the removal of the same number of square feet from use.
Obviously, the superintendent is pleased with the idea of providing a better environment for high school students.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
“It is more about creating a state-of-the-art educational center that our entire community can be proud of, that when our students go off and see all this wonderful stuff, that they can say, ‘Hey, we can do those great things,'” Warren told a group of stakeholders this week.
Where she was vague was in the students this new building might serve. Asked whether this would be the opportunity to merge into one new building the students attending Dollarway High School and the students attending Pine Bluff High School, she said that isn’t the purpose of the new structure… “but I think it would be awesome for the entire community to connect around a new high school.”
The backdrop of all of this, no matter when the discussion of a new high school started, is that Dollarway was losing students and didn’t have the revenue to exist on its own and is now part of the Pine Bluff district. Wouldn’t this be the perfect time to build something new for both school districts? And if such a move is a consideration, wouldn’t now be a good time to have some public discussions about putting the two high schools together and get some public buy in?
The fact that Dollarway patrons have lost their district identity has created a painful transition for them. But if everyone, from both areas of the city, could get behind one new structure that was built for, as Warren put it, “everyone to connect around,” it would seem that now is the time to set the stage for all that.
We’re thinking dollars and cents here, as in, wouldn’t it be less expensive and therefore a wise use of tax dollars to put all high schoolers under one roof? And we’re thinking school pride, as in, if the joining of these two districts creates something greater than the sum of their parts, wouldn’t it be nice to have a state-of-the-art facility that attracted families to the area? Something along the lines of: This isn’t Pine Bluff’s high school and it’s not Dollarway’s high school, it’s our high school.