Saturday, December 11, 1999
At Lakota, rapid growth now the norm
BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Millennium, schillennium. The people in Lakota Local Schools have been dealing with change for the last 25 years.
Growth in this Butler County district seems endless. Beginnings seem endless. Possibilities seem endless. And to the hearty staff overseeing it all, the work load must seem endless.
Last week, the district announced it will ask voters for $44 million for operation, renovation and construction of two new schools.
In most school districts, a levy campaign — particularly a building campaign — is something to build up to slowly, expend all your energy on, then put out of your mind for a good long time. Not in Lakota. The open pastures of Union and Liberty townships are still yielding 800 new home starts a year. Basketball hoops pop up at a good many of them. Schools must follow.
The rate of growth may be more dramatic in districts such as Mason and Kings, but what singles out Lakota is the duration of its growth — hundreds and hundreds of new students entering each year for a quarter of a century. Now the 500 pupils it adds annually join 14,671 already there, making the district the eighth-largest in Ohio. (The top seven are all big-city districts.)
Taking it in stride
What is so striking about this story, aside from its sheer numbers, is the general grace and good will with which residents and school personnel keep adapting to a pounding level of stress and growth.
Residents of Wyoming can relate to the massive undertaking it is to reconstruct one high school. Families in Oak Hills Local Schools have seen the years of planning and effort it takes to open one new school and redistrict students. Can we look with anything but awe, then, on a district that has opened 10 new schools in the last 11 years?
Most school districts panic at the thought of those awful years when they have to replace 40 teachers. Lakota has recruited 194 new certificated staff members in the last three years, all above and beyond normal resignations and retirements.
Heaven only help those school districts begging for bus drivers, cafeteria workers and custodians in this booming economy. Lakota has added 221 support staff since 1995.
The thought of buying three or four buses — base price $54,000 — in a single year has made more than one school treasurer break into a cold sweat. Every single year, Lakota adds eight new busses to its fleet of 160.
And every year, with new roads, homes and developments popping up, the district has to completely rework its bus routing.
Hellos and goodbyes
Emotionally, such growth brings its own benefits and extracts its own tolls. Hellos and good-byes happen daily in Lakota. Friends move. Teachers move to new schools. Even families who stay in the same home find themselves sending children to new school buildings as boundaries are continually readjusted (an event that taxes the good nature of even the most loyal supporters when it happens for the second or third time).
Academically, dealing with this amount of change would sink a lesser school system. Think of it — you're an elementary teacher who begins the year with a nice, clean roster and by the end of the year has scratched out five names and added seven others. Then proficiency tests roll around, the creators of which blindly assume you've had the same children, studying the same curriculum, all year.
It is no small miracle that better than three in four elementary students pass each section of the proficiency test, that nearly 90 percent score at or above national norms on standardized achievement tests, and that Lakota high schools produced 10 National Merit scholars last year.
So hail to the strong-hearted Lakotians, who work when the rest of us might whine. May their nerves hold out, their energy continue and (since it was going to happen anyway) their numbers increase.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202, or e-mail her at krista_ramsey@hotmail.com.
