Owensboro Public Schools proposed an idea to split its Spanish-speaking students between Cravens Elementary and Estes Elementary, due to imbalance and population issues that left Cravens with fewer students than other OPS elementary schools. With a Cravens renovation being the next major project for OPS, board members hope parents and students will respond positively.
“We do have a little bit of an overload of students, a little bit of an imbalance,” OPS Superintendent Nick Brake said. “Cravens is our lowest enrollment in elementary and Estes is one of our highest enrollments in elementary.”
All of OPS’ Spanish-speaking students currently reside at Estes.
“We’re thinking of splitting that Spanish-speaking population,” he said. “We have a large number of the Spanish population that moved into the Foust/Cravens neighborhoods, and they are working namely as agricultural workers in the west county, and so they’re moving closer and they’re not all as congregated in the Estes neighborhood as they used to be.”
The thought process in splitting Spanish-speaking students between the two schools was to split the population along Frederica Street. Those who want English language learner services and live west of Frederica will go to Cravens, while those who live east of Frederica will attend Estes.
Estes also has what Brake called a “very successful” pre-kindergarten/early childhood program that would benefit Cravens as well.
“We would recommend to Cravens that they add one of the early learning kindergarten programs, which is a preschool/kindergarten blend, which has had so much success at Estes, Brake said. “That could even draw some folks from the Foust neighborhood.”
Splitting the students between both schools would require OPS to make some transportation changes with pick-up and drop-off, though Brake said he believes that would be a relatively cost-effective endeavor.
“We’ve got a lot of capacity in the Cravens area. We don’t really have that at Estes, Newton Parrish or Sutton — or even at Foust, for that matter,” he said.
Matthew Constant said they have looked at where the pockets are in the districts and found a sizeable number of English language learners in the Newton Parrish district, which is at capacity right now.
“We feel like the best scenario is to move some of those students at Estes to Cravens — they’ll live closer to home,” Constant said, adding that it would be difficult to have all Spanish-speaking students under one roof as developing bus routes to pick up students around several different parts of the City would become problematic.
“We have a good problem in that we have so many people who want to come into our district,” Constant said. “We have a lot of people who want to come to our district because of our programming.”
Brake said some staff would have to move around as most of the English language learning staff works at Estes right now. Students will relocate before renovations at Cravens are complete.
