GAINESVILLE – Hall County School Superintendent Will Schofield told school board members Monday evening that plans under consideration for enhancing the Jones Early College Learning Program would take more discussion time than the board meeting could allow, and that a time for discussing the specific details of his plan would be set in the near future.
“We are going to need to sit down,” Schofield said to the board, “because the big question is the funding source…and that’s a much bigger question than you handle in a 15-minute conversation at a school board meeting.”
Last week Schofield made public plans to upgrade the former elementary school by the start of the 2019 fall semester, a project expected to cost in the neighborhood of $800,000.
“In terms of renovation at the Jones Learning Center that program continues to be one of the most incredible programs in my thirty-plus years of education,” Schofield said.
Schofield said the one area where expansion is most needed in college-credit course availability is science courses. “At this point we are not able to offer college level hard sciences – that would be biology, chemistry, physics – because we do not have a biology, chemistry, physics laboratory.“
Schofield added another science-based program he hopes to offer students: “That would be an absolute world-class health care science laboratory, even with the potential for a community clinic…so it would not only be a service to the community, but they (students) could do their clinicals in-house right there at the Early College Learning Center.”
One staff member told board members that learning to be a medical assistant or a phlebotomist were possible areas of study for such a program.
Hall County Schools Executive Director of Facilities & Construction, Matt Cox, presented the board with design plans for converting areas of the former elementary school into spaces more applicable to college level learning venues.
Cox pointed out that the area of the existing structure under consideration for a health care science lab would be in a section of the school that could be closed off from the rest of the building, insuring student security while providing separation from sick clients.
Cox then continued into an update of the district’s 10-year plan. He said the plan had not changed much since its last update but some of the details and priorities had.
Emerging as a priority since the last update is the need for building a middle school to compliment the new Cherokee Bluffs High School. “I think it would be close to the top,” Cox said. “We believe growth will take us there sooner than later.”
Schofield said of Cox’s update, “If you look at what Matt just said and you think of ‘have-tos’ and ‘potentials’, I don’t see in the next ten years, unless we have a major recession in this country again, how we get by without a Cherokee Bluff Middle School.”
