Following last month’s decision by the Lamar County School District Board of Trustees to reconfigure Oak Grove Primary School, Oak Grove Lower Elementary School and Oak Grove Upper Elementary School into two schools, board members have now renamed and zoned the schools.
Under the new plan, which begins at the start of the upcoming 2022-2023 school year, Oak Grove Primary will be known as Oak Grove Elementary and will serve Pre-K through fifth-grade students. Oak Grove Upper Elementary and Oak Grove Lower Elementary, which sit on the same campus, will be consolidated into one school – which will be known as Bellevue Elementary – to also serve Pre-K through fifth grade.
Currently, Oak Grove Primary serves Pre-K through first grade, Oak Grover Lower serves second and third grades, and Oak Grove Upper serves fourth and fifth grades.
“From a learning standpoint, this is going to provide us some consistency, with a six-year span that kids can stay in their same building with the same administration and the same counselors,” school district superintendent Steven Hampton said. “It’s much like what we do at Longleaf Elementary right now.
“If you’re in this area now, you would go to Oak Grove Primary, Oak Grove Lower, Oak Grove Upper, (Oak Grove) Middle and (Oak Grove) High, so by the time you graduate, you’ll go through five different schools. For parents, it’s five different car lines or bus drop-offs. But with this change, students will go through three schools – either Oak Grove Elementary, Bellevue Elementary or Longleaf Elementary – and from there, they’ll go to Oak Grove Middle and Oak Grove High, so there will be only three transitions in their school years.”
Beginning July 2023, students who live north of U.S. 98 in the Oak Grove attendance area will attend Longleaf Elementary. Students who live in the red shaded area on the provided map will attend Bellevue Elementary, and students who live in the yellow shaded area on the map will attend Oak Grove Elementary.
“I think it’s going to be beneficial from a learning standpoint first, but also from a parental standpoint as well,” Hampton said. “If I’ve got multiple children – like most families do, like myself – then I won’t have to drop off at two or more schools, or be a part of two different PTOs.
“I can drop off all of my Pre-K through (fifth-grade) students at one place, and be a part of one PTO. I think our parental involvement is going to increase; our parents are going to be more connected to the school because they’re not changing from one year to the next.”
Hampton said the school district will communicate as best as it can to notify parents of the changes, and the map showing the school lines has been posted online at www.lamarcountyschools.org.
“There’s going to be some that are on the line, because lines kind of follow roads,” he said. “So we’ll be able answer those questions, and we’re going to update our School Finder software that we have, where parents can go to our website and type in their address, and it will tell them what school to go to next year. We’re going to do everything possible to get the information to the parents.”
School district officials have had conversations with teachers throughout the schools, some of which will be required to move to a different location.
“Right now, we’ve got all kindergarten at Oak Grove Primary, but we can’t have all kindergarten teachers at one school,” Hampton said. “So we’re going to have to split them up – some kindergarten and first-grade teachers are going to have to go to Bellevue, and some second, third, fourth and fifth-grade teachers are going to have to come to the primary.
“We’ve already made those assignments and talked with the teachers about that, and that’s gone as smooth as it possibly can. Every step of this journey we’ve taken, looking at it from every different angle, has been very beneficial for our students. Even the teachers can see the benefits for our teachers in this move.”
Logistically, the school district runs 16 buses that begin their afternoon routes at Oak Grove Primary School. Those buses transport more than 700 kindergarten and first-grade students, who travel all the way to the upper and lower elementary schools on Old Highway 24.
Students also have to be transferred between buses, which Hampton said could be a safety issue, although there have been no accidents in that regard.
“But then they wait for the upper and lower (elementary schools) to release, and then the upper/lower students load those buses, and then they go on their routes,” Hampton said in an earlier story. “So there’s a lot of instruction time where we’re having to sacrifice with our students that are on buses, especially with our kindergarten and first-grade students that are on buses traveling to the upper/lower.
“With this model, we’re looking at somewhere around seven buses starting at the primary building, and then we have about nine or 10 buses that are out at the upper/lower. They all load at one time and they run their routes, and so there’s no travel time that’s being lost logistically for those students.”
As of now, officials do not see a need to build additional facilities to accommodate the students.
“We’ve roughly run those numbers, and at this point we have adequate space to house our students,” Hampton said. “The same number of students are attending those three schools now; they will still be attending the schools, and the numbers don’t change.
“We’re housing those numbers now, so we’re just redistributing students.”
