New school’s location spurs controversy for local educators

As applications for the new Bloomington New Technology High School begin to arrive, the debate about where the school should be located rages on.\nThe Monroe County Community School Corporation plans for New Tech to take over part of the first floor at Bloomington High School South. This option was selected over the school using part of Bloomington North or giving the school a separate stand-alone facility primarily for financial reasons.\nHowever, not everyone at South is pleased with the decision to move New Tech into the first floor of the school.\nSteve Smith, a U.S. history teacher at South, said he is opposed to New Tech moving into South. He said he thinks New Tech’s advantages could be provided by the district’s existing high schools if they changed certain aspects of their curriculum.\n“We will have displaced members,” said Smith, who could lose the room in which he has taught for the last 10 years.\nSo far, the new school will accept only students at 100, according to New Tech principal Alan Veach.\nThe new school will be licensed by the New Technology Foundation, which built its first New Tech school in Napa, Calif., in 1996. The foundation has established 35 schools nationwide, including three in Indiana already.\nNew Tech will be a public school without tuition. If it receives more than the maximum number of applicants, the school will have a lottery system for selecting its first class of 100 students.\nAs New Tech welcomes students in the fall, the social studies department at South will settle into different classrooms, possibly separated from one another throughout the school, Smith said.\n“Does that make a difference? Probably not, but it would be more convenient to be grouped together,” Smith said. “And it would be nice to keep the uniformity we currently have.”\nVeach, who is currently an assistant principal at South, said teachers might be moved around, but they will not have to travel throughout the day. He also said small class sizes are crucial to New Tech’s curriculum and could not be replicated in a large high school.\nVeach said the Monroe County Community School Corporation chose to put New Tech in South primarily for financial reasons, but he remains confident his school will get its own building.\n“I think it’s more of just a sense of fiscal responsibility,” he said. “And a couple of board members wanted to make sure we got a good facility, and they think that the one we proposed was not appropriate and that is why we have been instructed to keep looking.”\nSouth journalism teacher Kathleen Mills said if New Tech is unable to find a different home by 2009, it may have to take more space in South. Threatened spaces include the rooms for South’s two student publications, The Gothic, its yearbook, and The Optimist, its newspaper.\nMills said she thought New Tech could be valuable for students who are not currently engaged in school, but thinks New Tech needs its own building.\nBy relying more on students’ choices and not having bells or passing periods, South junior Rosalyn Stenberg said that New Tech’s idea of an adult environment would be disruptive in the disciplined environment at South.\nVeach said New Tech has been in the planning stages for two years, and while the building plans are difficult, the rest of New Tech is moving along fast.