Decatur Superintendent David Dude has announced that the city school system will put a new early childhood learning center on the three acres City Schools Decatur will purchase just south of downtown for $4.2 million.
The new pre-K school won’t happen for another three to five years, however. On the same night Dude announced the purchase early this month, the school board voted to reconfigure the system’s elementary structure into five K-2 schools and two 3-5 schools by the 2019-20 school year. That means the Early Childhood Learning Center will remain, at least for now, in the old College Heights building where it’s been since opening in 2005.
The land, currently owned by the Decatur Housing Authority, is on the Trinity Place block between CSD’s central office and the Cousins Properties development that eventually is to hold 329 apartments and a four-story office and retail structure. The Allen Wilson Terrace apartments that used to be there were demolished in 2014. Besides the United Methodist Children’s Home property Decatur recently arranged to purchase, this was the most conspicuous undeveloped tract in the city.
Since late 2014, nearly a year before Dude’s arrival, CSD has been talking with Columbia Ventures about building a pre-K center on its Avondale MARTA development, which broke ground last December. Dude insists the Trinity Place purchase doesn’t end those discussions. “We are still working with Columbia Ventures,” he said. “Right now we don’t know if we want a (second ECLC) or not. But we can’t serve the demand for an ECLC education in the community. I’d like to see all the taxpayers get their children in.”
Although CSD’s K-12 enrollment has nearly doubled since 2009, ECLC enrollment remains mostly static due to building limitations at 333 this year. There is a $1,300 to $1,400 per month tuition for children 3 and under, but 4-year-olds are mostly state funded.
The money to buy the Trinity Place site comes from a $75 million general obligation bond voters approved in November. 2015. There is no budget for building a new pre-K center, Dude said, or for repurposing College Heights into a K-2 school. He said that would emerge from CSD’s next round of facilities planning, which won’t commence for at least another year.
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