Plans to consolidate schools in the Selma City School System were established at the Selma City School Board meeting on Tuesday night.

Superintendent Dr. Avis Williams said that a Facilities Project Team was formed at the end of August, and that the team met on Aug. 30 to discuss what school facilities could be consolidated based on number of students and other factors.

“This is part of our strategic planning goal,” said Williams. “This is just a timeline that is proposed to take place and move forward. Moving forward, the group is working with the notes from the initial facilities meeting to draft recommendations and our next project team meeting is Sept. 18, and our expectation is that we will share the recommendations and get more input and feedback from the facilities team.

“Our goal is to have three recommendations to bring before the board,” said Williams. “At our October board meeting, we will share those recommendations. These will not be formal recommendations at this time, but it will be just to share the thoughts and progress, and to get feedback in directions moving forward.

“At that time, we also will share those recommendations with the community, and have two community meetings tentatively on Oct. 16 and Oct. 23,” said Williams. “There will be another team meeting on Oct. 25 at which time we expect to take all the feedback received to make an initial recommendation. The initial recommendation will be for a first read at the October school board meeting followed by an additional community meeting in November, and a second meeting with a recommendation for approval at the December board meeting.

“Within the recommendations presented we will have different timelines,” said Williams. “In other words, it could be over the course of two or three years on which schools may close. We will also look at staffing and more stakeholder communications particularly to the impacted schools. We also will look at possibly submitting a reconfiguration packet to the State Department of Education. Transportation and faculty meetings will also be held from January and beyond with final staffing updates and recommendations made between March and May.”

School Board Member Brenda Randolph – Obomanu said that she asked Williams to add some school personnel on the business meetings to let them see what financial situations the school system is in.

“The situation with Byrd, a lot of people do not know that they write grants for most of their funding for their teachers,” she said. “I just don’t want us to go backwards. Byrd was the model for the state with the Pre-K program, and when we first got it, I was disappointed because some of the things we used to do we can no longer do. I want you (Williams) to be diligent in understanding that we are not going to let buildings just sit here to be an eyesore in Selma.”

Williams said that ownership of the buildings whether owned by the school system or the City of Selma also would be considered.

“We started out by looking at the feasibility study that was done,” Williams said. “Then we looked at all of the buildings as far as the capacity, enrollment and we looked at the locations of each of the buildings. So, we did start out by looking at the district as a whole in terms of the numbers and capacities.”