During a meeting Tuesday, May 15, the Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District Governing Board unanimously agreed to a suggestion put forward by Cottonwood Middle School Principal Matt Schumacher.
Starting at the beginning of the next school year, Cottonwood Middle School will be renamed Cottonwood Community School.
The name change is one of the last big decisions as part of COCSD’s long realignment project and is a final touche to its plan, which will close Cottonwood Elementary School and turn both Cottonwood Middle School and Dr. Daniel Bright Elementary School into kindergarten through eighth grade schools.
“I absolutely see it as a new beginning, and I’ve never treated it as anything but that,” Schumacher said about the transition of the middle school into a community school. “I think this is a very unique opportunity, both for this campus, and for the broader community in the Verde Valley to redefine what we’re doing and how we’re doing it for the 21st century.”
Schumacher said he sees this as a vital step to take, which will help make the new school feel like a school for kids of all ages, instead of just a middle school. In his view, students at the new K-8 schools will benefit from a feeling of community as they will stay in one building from the beginning of their academic careers until they attend high school.
“Community certainly has very strong ideals behind it, and we want to move toward community impact projects for our kids,” Schumacher said. “I’m of the idea that schools should be comprehensive, and be very much a staple and interconnected with their communities and the real-world opportunities that communities can offer the schools and vice versa.”
Even as the school changes, Schumacher said that he looks for some continuity. The new school will keep CMS’s logo and colors, and by changing just one letter in the abbreviation from CMS to CCS, the hope is to make the necessary changes in labeling as painless as possible.
While Schumacher will be staying on as principal at the new CCS, Oak Creek School and Mountain View Preparatory will both have new principals in the coming year, and Cottonwood Elementary School principal Jessica Vocca will be moving over to take over as principal of the new K-8 Dr. Daniel Bright as Cottonwood Elementary School is closing. Current DDB principal Nancy Erickson will move to assistant principal.
After months of logistical maneuvering and changes, COCSD Superintendent Steve King said he feels hopeful that the realignment process will go smoothly.
The district staff spent hours going through the map of Cottonwood with high level details about student demographics such as race, special needs, income and gender to determine a good way of dividing out the two school’s populations. They found that students living west of a line running from State Route 260 to SR 89A will go to DDB, while students east of that divide will attend the new CCS. A small exception will be made for a small neighborhood close to E. Prairie Lane, which will send its children to DDB.
“We spent time in our admin planning meetings working on where to move those lines to create that equitability amongst our different student populations,” said Tricia Winters, King’s executive assistant. “It just happened. That’s how it worked out.”
Additionally, the school is working on ways to ensure that, despite the geographical division, students will still feel like a united district.
Micah Swanson, an eighth-grade teacher at CMS, worked with the student council to create ways for students at the middle school to stay in touch with their former classmates. The school district also intends to continue hosting united school dances, and the sport teams at the two schools will also competing against each other to give the kids an opportunity to stay connected by participating in sports.
“It’s been very supportive across the board,” King said. “Since we rolled [the plan] out in November of last year, I don’t think I’ve had a single phone call at this office that’s been negative.”
Even as the school finalizes most decisions, there are still a few leftover touches that need to be made. New transportation routes for the district still need to be set up over the summer, and King said he expects that there will be more input from parents as the change begins and the students start attending the new schools in August.
“I’m under no illusions,” King said. “Inevitably there will be challenges, of course. That’s just to be expected, but the people here, everybody knows that.”
Jon Hecht can be reached at 634-8551 or email jhecht@larsonnewspapers.com
