ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — The Orange County School Board is going forward with a plan to create a gifted student-only magnet school and one of the locations they want to set it up is Cherokee School.
Currently, the school houses students with emotional and behavioral disabilities that make a traditional classroom setting a challenging environment.
In the next three to six years, that could be where some of them end up.
“That school, whether it is a gifted school or another type of school, is not going to remain a small, 30-student special needs school,” board member Bill Sublette said.
But some neighbors in the area around the school don’t understand why the Cherokee School students should be the ones put out.
“If the goal of the school board is to pull gifted kids out of school because they can’t be taught properly in that environment, then why would they treat (the Cherokee School students) any differently?” resident Jeff Kreger asked.
School officials have said the school is too close to homes considering the challenging student population, but Kreger said the neighborhood has embraced the students.
“We volunteer,” he said. “We’ve helped to raise money. Other neighbors have done the same.”
The students at Cherokee School have become a part of the neighborhood, Kreger said.
Even if Cherokee School doesn’t become a new school for gifted students, it is not going to operate as it is now, Sublette said.
“Under no circumstances is that school going to remain what it is,” he said. “That program is being moved. It’s just a matter of what we do with the facility.”
The school board has not set a timeline for making a decision about the future of Cherokee School.