InTucker Magazine

Smoke Rise Elementary Project Remains on Schedule

School Set to Open to Students for 2021-’22 Academic Year

With the scientific community coalescing around the notion that in-person learning is, in fact, the best and safest option for children, students across the DeKalb County School District are headed back to class later this month. It’s a relief to many parents, who had been concerned about their children’s mental health. For the students themselves, it’s a chance to learn in a traditional environment surrounded in a socially distant fashion by their peers; a marked change from the last two semesters of schooling.

But for one Tucker Cluster school, the excitement will be tempered until the new school year in August.

“We’re ready!” declared Smoke Rise Elementary Principal Pamela McCloud.

McCloud, her faculty and her students return this month to a lame duck building. They’ll finish out the 2020-‘21 school year, and then move into the newest, most state-of-the-art school building in DeKalb County. The new Smoke Rise Elementary School will be situated along Hugh Howell Road at the entrance to the Smoke Rise community. The project, which remains on schedule for an August completion, will more than double the student capacity at the school.

“It looks like a high school, but it’s an elementary school,” McCloud said. “We’re moving from the 400 [students] to the 900, but that just means more little bodies, more little minds and more children to love.”

DeKalb Regional Superintendent Trenton Arnold oversees the Tucker Cluster schools, among others in the district, and has had an eye on this project from its inception. He said that, while a new school building is an exciting prospect, it won’t alter the nature of what McCloud and her staff have built at Smoke Rise.

“You move into a new house, but it doesn’t change who you are as a family…and Smoke Rise is a family,” Arnold said.

One of the big conversation points around the district has been the idea of redistricting. With several new elementary schools being built, parents are wondering what it means for attendance lines, especially in those schools that are currently overcrowded. Both Arnold and Tucker’s School Board representative Allyson Gevertz have discussed the reality of redistricting in the past, but Arnold now says the idea is on hold as DeKalb Schools have ordered a districtwide comprehensive master plan. 

“What the district had done in the past when it came to redistricting was sort of piecemeal it by clusters,” Arnold explained. “What we’ve realized through our current data trends and enrollment numbers, there are parts of the district that have schools that are well over 100 percent instructional capacity and, in some instances, that requires not just a singular look at a school or a cluster, but perhaps a holistic look at the entire district. This comprehensive master plan is going to take a look at student enrollment data, its trends, its special programming that we have across the district, its available spaces, all elements to make recommendations to the district on what any sort of redistricting, attendance lines and so forth would look like.”

It’s a process Arnold said would take a year to complete, meaning any redistricting would be more than a year down the road. 

McCloud and her staff aren’t concerning themselves with long-term concepts like redistricting. Instead, they’re focused on a spring semester of reconnecting with students and preparing for the big move this summer.

“’It’s about time’ is what we’re hearing,” she shared. “From the stakeholders, from the students…there’s excitement in the air. We cannot wait to get into the new building.…We are so ready to get into the new classrooms, to start some great teaching and learning. The teachers are excited about it.

“It’ll boost the morale of being in a new space, a new building. The old building is great, as well. We’ve got a lot of band-aids on it to keep it going, but in this new space it just provides an environment…a space where our boys and girls can expand, grow, learn.”

For a school that has seen significant increases in test scores and other standardized measures in the past few years, this new building will be another bit of momentum for McCloud and her staff to seize on as they continue to raise the bar at Smoke Rise.