Four Plans for rezoning

There are four plans for the rezoning. The office of Pupil Assignment seems to be recommending plan Four to the OCPS School Board. Plan Four relocates the most neighborhoods in Ocoee. Here are the reasons introduced at the September 10th Community meeting.

Plan Four may reduce the number of Students at both Lake Whitney Elementary School and Thornebrooke Elementary. The Office of Pupil Assignment would like to remove portable classrooms at the two existing elementary schools and reduce the attendance to 575 for LWES and 675 at TES. The new school (15-E-W-4) is estimated to have 700-750 students in plan Four.

Current Enrollment at LWES and TES 9/5/07
Lake Whitney Elementary: 992
Thornebrooke Elementary: 868

Without portables the schools were designed for the following capacities:
Lake Whitney Elementary: 514
Thornebrooke Elementary: 600
new school (15-E-W-4): 794

The office of Pupil Assignment said the plan to remove portables will enable the existing schools to utilize their facilities as planned. For example Lake Whitney was built for 514 students and currently has 992. This affects the students when they utilized the schools shared resources such as the Media Center, Cafeteria, Science Classroom, Music Classroom. Currently our son attends Kindergarden at LWES and has Science class, Art Class and Music Class every nine days. If the number of students were reduced perhaps he could have these classes more often. He also has lunch at 11:25 every morning.

The hope is that the number of students at Lake Whitney could be reduced but the Office of Pupil Assignment could not gaurentee that any of the four plans would reduce the number of students. It's possible that the new school could be built and the number of Students at a Lake Whitney stays the same because more families move into the neighborhoods zoned for LWES. The portables may not be removed if Plan Four is implimented.

Of the four plans, Plan Four moves the most neighborhoods away from LWES and TES into the new School.

As you look at the plans please notice that the yellow zone indicates the areas for the new school. Much of this area is undeveloped and only estimates can be utilized to determine the number of students who will attend. The areas south of Tomyn road are already developed. Crosscreek neighborhood is south of the new school on the east side of Maguire and is already developed. Estimates have been made about the diversity of the students at the new school based on anticipated home building plans and sales of homes that have not been built at this time.

Affected Neighborhoods

The following Neighborhoods in Ocoee may be rezoned to the new Elementary School:

Windermere Groves

Crosscreek

Brookestone

Wesmere
-Cheshire Woods
-Fenwick Cove
-Cresentlake
-Hampton Woods
-Pelican Isle
-Brookhaven Oaks
-Fairfax
-Laurenburg
-Carisbrooke
-Mill Creek