DALTON, Ga. — After 10 years of exploratory committees, fact-finding commissions, planning groups, facilities collaborations and study committees to address overcrowding at Dalton High School and Dalton Middle School, the members of the Board of Education are giving a new idea to another committee.

Monday night, board member Steve Laird made a motion to form a committee of school officials and community members to study the possibility of a flex-scheduling plan for high school students. The motion passed without opposition and now a second-shift high school will be seriously studied and considered.

Flex scheduling has been promoted in the community by One Dalton-FlexSchoolPlan, identified on its Facebook page as a “group of parents, teachers and community stakeholders committed to smaller, safer and more manageable school environments for our children.”

A benefit of the plan, according to school officials, would be to have fewer students at the high school in the mornings, but the overriding agenda of the committee will be to decrease Dalton High School’s enrollment to allow the school to move down two classifications in the Georgia High School Association (GHSA). 

“This board as well as many others for about a decade have been exploring options to solve the long-term facilities needs of the district,” board Chairman Rick Fromm said. “We share the same urgency of every parent in the room or the community who have shown up at this meeting and others.” 

Action on the idea was to begin immediately as Chief Administrative Officer Craig Harper said the system would send surveys to both parents and existing staff on Tuesday to gauge the interest level in a flex schedule.

The flex-scheduling plan that has been floated would have some Dalton High students begin their day on the same schedule as now, with a separate group of students beginning at midday and continuing until 6:30 p.m. At some point in the day, the “flex” students would be bused to Dalton Middle School. Because of GHSA rules, in order for those students not to count against the high school’s enrollment numbers for classification purposes, those students must spend 51 percent of their time at a separate location.

In essence, the plan would create a third high school for Dalton Public Schools with the goal of keeping 1,000 of the system’s high school students off of the books at Dalton High School. Morris Innovative High School already houses approximately 400 students, and DHS needs to lose at least another 600 students to guarantee a drop below the current line to be classified as a Class 4A school.

“Redistributing our students — which is really what we are talking about doing — should positively impact GHSA classification,” said Jennifer Phinney, one of five directors of School Support and the original principal at Morris Innovative. “… I would want to say, just personally, if we move towards a late-shift school, we really need to think about that as a temporary solution. That can’t be our long-term answer to population distribution in Dalton Public Schools. We are going to have to think about and get a more sustainable solution.”

The new committee will be armed with a clear set of GHSA rules on which to follow during the process. Called the “Strategic Visioning Fact Pattern for GHSA” on the board’s agenda, the position paper sets forth the “facts” the committee will base their work from. Fromm and Superintendent Jim Hawkins said there were several misconceptions about GHSA rules and administrative procedures among many who have approached the board seeking solutions concerning athletics, so they want the committee members to have a clear base to begin from.

Board members, school administrators, coaches and parents have expressed concerns over Dalton High playing in Class 6A in GHSA competition. While the school hasn’t suffered any competitive imbalance — as evidenced by the football team’s run to the state semifinals and the girl’s softball team’s run in the state tournament, among others — travel has become a huge factor as Dalton is in a region with schools mainly in the north Atlanta suburbs of Cobb and Cherokee counties. Travel was such a major concern during basketball season that the region changed its rules and allowed each DHS region basketball game to count twice to reduce travel not only for Dalton but for all of the other schools in the region as well. Normally, teams would play a home-and-home series in the season, but that was not the case this year. 

Area schools such as Ridgeland, Northwest Whitfield, Southeast Whitfield, Gilmer and Pickens are in Class 4A. Dalton would have to drop two classifications to alleviate travel concerns because, as with Class 6A, there are no Class 5A schools in close proximity to Dalton.

Dalton was placed in Class 6A beginning with the 2016-17 school year after the school reported a student population of 1,829 students in October 2015. The top enrollment for a Class 4A school based off of 2015 numbers was 1,375.

The GHSA is currently on a four-year reclassification plan, which is a first for the organization. However, at the end of two years with the October 2017 counts, the GHSA has said it will re-examine classification if any schools have significant population shifts either up or down which would cause a move in classification. Either way, Dalton is locked into Class 6A through at least the end of the next school calendar year. 

And while Fromm said the board members recognize the need for quick action, a long-term solution to overcrowding at both the high school and middle school is still the ultimate goal. 

“It would be a shame to pull away from the process that has us moving forward,” Fromm said. “Everything we do between now and the total resolution is guided by that process so we can incorporate (flex scheduling) and not get derailed along the way. At the same time, we understand there is a real urgency to do something in the community. We share that urgency.”

He also called for more unity from the parties involved in the discussion, saying that hasn’t always been the case during the last decade of talks and meetings. 

“It is obviously critical that we work together as a community and identify what commonality we have and not try to align ourselves in pro-camps and anti-camps that ultimately derail a process,” he said. “If the groups are committed to being equally loud on both sides, you have a process that doesn’t really move along. This problem is not going away.”

The board members and Hawkins as well as other school staff will host an open house on Tuesday, March 28, at City Hall starting at 5:30 p.m. In addition to the athletic concerns, issues such as secondary facilities, literacy, drug testing and the 2018 budget will be discussed in small group settings.