“Imagine Foundations Public Charter School may move out of its increasingly crowded Upper Marlboro building in time for the 2011-2012 school year, and Morningside Elementary School — shuttered in 2009 — is one of two locations under consideration.
Attempts to reopen Morningside Elementary School as a new contract school failed last year. Pat Crain, regional director of Imagine Schools, a nonprofit that runs Imagine Foundations and one other charter school in Prince George’s County, has confirmed school officials are looking at Morningside Elementary and a private building on Brightseat Road in Landover as options for the upcoming school year.
Morningside parents have lobbied to reopen their neighborhood school since it closed during countywide school consolidations. They worked with Imagine Schools on a proposal to open a new contract school with spots reserved for Morningside families, but the Prince George’s County Board of Education never voted on the plan, effectively killing it.
Unlike contract schools, which allow flexibility in how students are chosen, charter schools pick all students by lottery, meaning Morningside families could not be guaranteed spaces.
Morningside Councilwoman Regina Foster, who helped spearhead the contract school proposal and is the mother of four elementary school-aged children, said she wants the school to reopen, but is disappointed there wouldn’t be spots for local children.
‘[The building] was closed because it was uninhabitable,’ she said. ‘Now it’s habitable, but not for our students.’
Shauna Battle, deputy general counsel for the county school system, said Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. has expressed support for reopening Morningside Elementary, but she did not know when the plan might be formally introduced to the school board.
Crain said he hopes to have a location secured within the next few weeks; if not, officials may delay moving for another year. The next school board meeting is scheduled for Feb. 24.
Imagine Foundations opened in 2007 and serves about 300 students in kindergarten through sixth grade; each year the school has met Adequate Yearly Progress, the state benchmark for student achievement. The school will eventually serve 400 students after adding a seventh and eighth grades, but Principal William Hill said the current site is too small to handle that growth.
On most mornings and afternoons, cars snake around the parking lot and queue along a shoulder of Brown Station Road. The school used to get a stipend from the county for buses, but those funds were cut this year, according to Hill.
Hill is leaving for an administrative job with Cleveland public schools as of Feb. 4. Despite all the changes, he said parents should expect ‘little to no disruption’ in day-to-day operations.
Chris Shieh, an Imagine Foundations parent who lives across the street from the school, said he will remove his 7-year-old, Ryan Shieh, if the school moves because it would no longer be convenient.
‘We’ve liked all the teachers that Ryan has had,’ he said. ‘We’re kind of disappointed.’
Upper Marlboro resident Lakwona Simmons, who has two children at Imagine Foundations, said a new site may increase her travel time — it takes her less than 10 minutes to drive to Imagine Foundations and would take about 20 minutes to get to Morningside — but she would likely keep her children enrolled.
‘It’s an investment we’ve made,’ she said. ‘It would be a journey, but it’d be worth it.'”
Article published on January 24, 2011 by The Gazette