A.J. district board votes to shut down 2 schools

Feb 26, 2010 — East Valley Tribune

Michelle Reese

Feb. 26, 2010 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- The governing board for the Apache Junction Unified School District voted unanimously Tuesday to close Thunder Mountain Middle School and Gold Canyon Elementary School after this school year.

The board also voted to reconfigure the grades at its remaining schools. The four remaining elementary schools will go from kindergarten through fifth grade to kindergarten through sixth grade. The remaining middle school will convert to a junior high school for seventh- and eighth-graders.

The district is facing tough economic times as well as declining enrollment. It lost about 5 percent of its students from the 2008-09 school year to the current school year, Superintendent Chad Wilson said. Administrators are still working on projections for next school year.

The closings will affect about two-thirds of Thunder Mountain's current enrollment of 630 students because the eighthgraders are moving to the high school next year. Gold Canyon currently has 333 students.

The district will redraw boundaries for all elementary and middle schools.

"It doesn't necessarily mean everyone will be reassigned," Wilson said.

The high school will also undergo a change, creating more "professional learning communities" -- schools within schools -- and adding a project-based learning curriculum, in which students take what they're learning and create written reports, digital presentations, oral reports or multimedia projects, Wilson said.

"We'll be incorporating more 21st century technology into the classroom," Wilson said.

Wilson projects the district will lose about 40 teachers through a reduction in force. He hopes to be able to let teachers know by mid-April.

Apache Junction joins several other districts in the state that are planning to close schools next school year in light of an economic crisis.

The Mesa Unified School District's governing board voted in January to close Powell Junior High School and reconfigure the curriculum at Alma Elementary School. The district will also put Hendrix Junior High and Frost Elementary School under one administration and turn it into an International Baccalaureate academy. In addition, Mesa will add ninth-graders to all of its high schools in the next two years.

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