Busy Days for School Board's Stultz

People want Tim Stultz to know how they feel, and he’ll do his share of listening over the course of the next couple of days.

Wednesday night, the Cobb County Board of Education member who represents Smyrna, will receive more than an earful of comments when he hosts a public forum regarding . The next evening in Marietta at its scheduled meeting, the board will vote on the proposed purchase of 18 acres for $7.8 million for the area replacement school.

But that won’t be the main topic at hand Thursday as the fate of the 2011-12 school calendar is expected to be the hot topic during the board’s public comment period that begins at 7 p.m.

Smyna-Vinings Patch will be tweeting (@smyrnapatch) from Wednesday’s public forum at and Smyrna.Patch.com will feature a live blog from Thursday night’s meeting, as well.

Last week, at the work session, board members decided to launch an online survey of the three calendar options. The survey will be open until 1 p.m. Thursday, but spokesman Jay Dillon has indicated the district would not release any survey results prior to then.

This is the first year Cobb County has used the balanced calendar, which roughly splits the school year into two semesters before and after the winter holidays. Opponents think the calendar provides too many breaks for students and forces them to ride buses without air conditioning during the hottest days of August. They favor returning to the traditional calendar, with school starting about mid-August and with fewer weeklong vacations.

All week parents and teachers have been expressing their opinions on the hotly debated topic through emails and online posts. One reader who identified himself as “ADW’’ wrote on the Smyrna-Vinings Patch website, “A majority of TEACHERS in the Cobb County School District voted to have a BALANCED CALENDAR for three years! Now, less than one year­ … what is there to vote on?!’’

Last summer, Stultz campaigned that he was in favor of reimplementing a traditional calendar.

Wednesday night’s forum on the new elementary school will take place at CHS beginning at 6:30 p.m. Last week, the district proposed a site adjacent to the Belmont Hills shopping center for the new school scheduled to open in the fall of 2013.

The 18 acres are spread over three parcels of land and would come at a price of about $433,698 per acre. The plans are for the district to pay Halpern Enterprises $4.3 million for a 9-acre parcel of land that is apart of the Belmont Hills redevelopment. City residents Robert and Jennifer Young are to be paid about $588,060 for a 1.5-acre parcel, while the city of Smyrna will sell the district the 7.5-care Smyrna Commons apartment complex for $2.9 million.

In August 2008, the Smyrna Downtown Area Development Authority bought the complex for $4.6 million from Highlands Associates Limited. The plan is for the district to use funds from the county’s proposed 2011 Special Purpose Option Sales Tax, which voters will decide on March 15, in order to construct an Atlanta Road-Ward Street connector on the Smyrna Commons land in 2012.

Parts of the land bordering the new road would be utilized as ball fields and open space to be used by both Campbell HS and the new elementary school.

The new school will help address overcrowding issues at several elementary schools including , , and possibly . According to the Marietta Daily Journal, the board will vote on Thursday whether to pay $598,000 to an Atlanta-based firm to put forth architectural plans for the new school.