Birmingham Highway - Wood Road Elementary School Informational Meeting
categories: Announcements, Milton Real Estate, Schools
This post is mostly informational only. There is a meeting on September 25th at 7PM for the community to learn more about the new school and to ask questions about the school’s features, design, bus transportation and redistricting. The meeting will be held at Summit Hill Elementary School on Providence Road.
This is not a meeting to discuss whether or not there should be a school on the site at Birmingham Highway and Wood Road just south of the entrance to White Columns. That ship has long since sailed.
Personally, I’m not opposed to a new elementary school at that location. (However, what I am opposed to is the proposed new high school and possibly middle school at the other end of Wood Road on Freemanville Road.)
We need another elementary school. It is fitting that the meeting will be help at Summit Hill because that school stands to benefit the most from the construction of a new school. Summit Hill is the most overcrowded elementary school in the Fulton County School System, with an enrollment of 1,008 students, fortunately down from the projected 1,050 students. For anyone who is opposed to a new elementary school, count the trailers there or visit during recess and see where the kids get to play.
The new school is apparently going to be modeled after Renaissance Elementary in Fairburn, which is 
pictured above. The school will sit facing northwest on the site and have an 850 student capacity and 54 classrooms. There will be a 45,000 gallon septic system with fourteen drainfield zones located on the northwest portion of the site.
All access to the school will be off of Birmingham Highway; no access will be from Wood Road.
The projected opening date for the new school is September 2009. Originally it was supposed to be 2008. That is one of the questions that I have: Why was construction delayed? The money was available through SPLOST funding. What I heard is that the City of Milton slowed the project down, but I don’t know that for fact or why they would do that, not that it can be changed now. I’m just curious to know what our elected representatives and newly formed city are doing in this regard. They say they have no control over the new high school.
In the end, though, the school is only a physical building. It is not really a school until you fill it with children and teachers and administrators. The most important thing is not selection of the brick color or the direction the school faces but who will be the principal. That, and, of course, what the mascot and school colors will be.
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