BATTLE GROUND — Maple Grove School will be a kindergarten through fourth-grade campus next fall. That comes after a divided vote by the Battle Ground Public Schools board of directors Monday night to convert the school in order to tackle overcrowding throughout the district’s south end.
Maple Grove’s middle school students will instead attend either Tukes Valley or Daybreak middle schools while absorbing 243 Glenwood Heights Primary School students. The proposal, which includes other, smaller shifts, is expected to affect 487 students.
The board voted 4-1 in favor of the plan after first voting down a proposal that would have made changes to school boundaries across the district’s south end. Board President Troy McCoy called the division on the board reflective of the difficulty of the decision.
Converting Maple Grove into a K-4 school also represents a symbolic shift for the district. With that decision, Battle Ground sheds some of the last vestiges of No Child Left Behind, a President George W. Bush-era federal education policy that mandated that schools consistently failing to meet annual progress goals make drastic changes.
Maple Grove, after failing to meet the required measures, converted to a K-8 school seven years ago. It’s the only campus like it in Battle Ground, whose schools are otherwise divided into K-4 primary schools and 5-8 middle schools.
That fact was not lost on Superintendent Mark Ross or the school board. Ross said having a K-4 model will give that school a chance to have a more cohesive curriculum, allow teachers more time to collaborate, and put all middle-school teachers and students throughout the district on the same daily schedule.
“We have an opportunity to right the system,” Ross said.
Board member Monty Anderson acknowledged the No Child Left Behind-era changes and said Maple Grove worked as a K-8 campus, but supported the change “due to the growth that we have and the lack thereof in our ability to build additional facilities.”
The school board’s decision caps months of work for the district, whose leaders decided in the spring to explore boundary changes to address overcrowding. Battle Ground voters twice rejected school construction bonds last year, which if approved would have allowed the district to rebuild south-end campuses and construct a new primary-middle school campus.
As development continues on the district’s south end, the county’s largest district geographically is expected to see a growing number of students. A district-commissioned report by E.D. Hovee & Co. Economic and Development Services suggests another 1,535 to 2,740 students could join the district within the next decade. Most of that growth will be concentrated within the current Glenwood Heights Primary School and Laurin Middle School boundaries.
