HIGH HOPES IN DESTIN

Building a Destin High School isn’t about what Destin needs in 2008, it’s about what Destin needs in 2028, some local residents say.

“The whole idea is to plan for the future, five, 10, 20 years down the road,” former City Councilor Larry Williges told the Okaloosa County School Board Monday.

About 100 Destin residents attended the meeting. More than a dozen spoke up to say that Destin needed a high school for community pride, to spare teenagers the commute to Fort Walton Beach and to let children who’d gone through Destin Elementary and Middle Schools together stay together.

The board took no action other than to say they couldn’t afford a new high school now, but board member Rodney Walker said they did support the concept.

After the meeting, Destin City Councilor Sandy Trammell said she believed the board would back a high school if it could, now that the members realized how strongly the community felt.

Charlie Saleeby, a prime mover behind the push for a high school, told the board that rather than DHS being too small to offer students lots of extracurricular activities — one of the arguments Superintendent of Schools Alexis Tibbetts has made — it would be the other way around:

“More kids could participate in more activities ... If you had three 700 student populations, that’s three teams of everything.

“I think most of our opponents think the quality of education would not be as good as it is at Fort Walton. That’s probably true initially, but I ask you to look to the future.”

Saleeby added that cost wasn’t an issue if the board had the will to act: Okaloosa has built two north county schools without a tax increase, and

Walton County has built three schools in the past decade with state support. Saleeby said State Rep. and Speaker-Designate Ray Sansom had promised support at the state level.

Saleeby received a standing ovation from the crowd. Some board members, however, pointed out that all Sansom could promise was support, not actual funding.

The board also sounded skeptical of Saleeby’s solution to finding land for a high school: Build a new middle school — which would cost less than a new high school — where DES has its athletic fields and running track; remodel DMS into a high school; then convince the local Catholic Diocese to provide land for new athletic facilities. Alternatively, he said, the county could provide Destin with athletic facilities as it did the other Okaloosa cities.

“As far as I’m concerned, the land is not an issue,” Saleeby said.

Board member Howard Hill said he lived in Niceville and the county didn’t provide anything of the sort there.

While several parents complained about the long bus rides to Fort Walton Beach High School, Destin City Councilor Jim Bagby said he’d survived hour-long, one-way bus rides to his west Texas high school. Bagby said he’d support a Destin charter high school, but he’d sooner see the district spend money adding classrooms to DES than building a regular high school. The audience applauded Bagby too.

Destin students and FWB High School students Caroline Hudson, Bobby Lyerly and Emily Lyerly also won applause, even though all three said they didn’t think they’d have as much fun in Destin as they were having in Fort Walton Beach.

“We just wanted you to hear the kids’ voices,” Hudson said.

After the meeting, Destin resident Jim Nissley said that students who’d spent their whole school career with the same small class might find it exciting to move to a larger school and interact with a new group.

Destin parent Dana Chandler said that instead of DMS offering programs for 44 fifth-graders, the board should turn DMS into a sixth to ninth grade school, so that the high school would only need to hold the 10th through 12th grades. Like several other speakers, she said the board needed to buy land now, or there’d be nowhere to build when population growth made a DHS necessary.

“There are ways to make it happen if we have a positive attitude and say we can find a way to do this,” Destin parent Terry Eisler said.
Mayor Craig Barker said that while it was common for activists to claim they represented hundreds of people, based on the phone calls he’d received “it literally is true ... For every person here tonight, there’s a hundred back home.”

The school board members and staff said the high school supporters’ financial arguments didn’t hold water:

•Rather than the 750 students that Saleeby estimated, DHS attendance would be between 470 and 500.

•The two north Okaloosa schools were built by assuming $70 million of debt, which had locked up the district’s bondable revenue for the next 20 years. Also, Florida wouldn’t allow DHS to be built with debt when there’s capacity in other Okaloosa schools for more students.

•Walton County is a rural school district, so the financial rules are different. It also has a smaller student population, so the tax dollars Walton takes in go further.

•While the state is cutting school revenue an average 1.8 percent, that’s an average: In Okaloosa County, it’s closer to 5.5 percent.

•A new high school would require more space than DMS because of state requirements: A parking lot for student cars; separate exits for cars and buses; providing space for athletic facilities; and not building near an airport.

“It’s really hard to get all the things you need,” Facilities Director Bill Smith said, pointing out it had taken three years to find land in Crestview for a new school.

Board member Walker said when state cutbacks were figured in, county schools were in the worst financial shape in 48 years.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t make it happen — this board will try to make it happen,” Walker said. “People in the community much smarter than I am may come up with a way to make this happen.”