Mark Woods: Signs of the times — a neighborhood rallies to save the neighborhood school

Tim Andrews went to Holiday Hill Elementary from 1966 through 1971. His brothers and sisters went there. All three of his children went there. Now his grandson, Kaiden, goes there and recently finished kindergarten.

When Andrews went to the school for an end-of-year ceremony, his grandson asked him a question.

“As we’re leaving, he says, ‘Poppy, you ever think that you used to walk down this same sidewalk?” Andrews said.

Andrews, 63, has been thinking about that a lot lately, about what the school means to him and to the neighborhood. And he’s hardly alone.

There are hundreds of signs dotting the yards in the area near the school — roughly between Atlantic Boulevard to the north and Beach Boulevard to the south, Pottsburg Creek to the west and Southside Boulevard to the east.

The gray-and-blue placards say “Save Holiday Hill Elementary” and, in a sign of the area’s Hispanic population, some add “Salva Holiday Hill Elementary.”

The signs started sprouting all over the neighborhood shortly after the news that, faced with a financial crisis, Duval County Public Schools was considering closing dozens of schools — including potentially Holiday Hill Elementary.

“Holiday Hill School is the backbone to this area,” Andrews said. “In a way, I know what they're saying about the reason behind this: attendance, not getting the money per child. But I'm telling you, if we lose Holiday Hill School …. this neighborhood is going to go.”

Three pillars in Holiday Hill neighborhood

School district officials emphasize that nothing is set in stone. No decisions have been made. And I don’t envy those trying to make them. Still, even the list of potential closures being out there has prompted supporters of schools all over the city to spring into action. 

With a half dozen public meetings scheduled for June 10 through June 20, I liked the idea of telling the story of people in a neighborhood rallying around a school. There are similar stories in other neighborhoods involving other schools. Some have more clout, or get more attention, than Holiday Hill Elementary.

It isn’t in the richest neighborhood or the poorest neighborhood. It’s a working-class neighborhood, with homes built in the 1940s and 1950s, and an elementary school that in 2024 has a diverse mix of students: 43% white, 19% Black, 24% Hispanic and the rest multiracial, Asian, Pacific Islander and Native American.

I spent some time in that neighborhood a couple of years ago. Michael Jurney was trying to bring baseball back to Glynlea Park, a park that once was the center of community activity for decades but had fallen into disrepair. He succeeded in doing that, starting a nonprofit, Youth to Champions. But now he’s worried about the school.

More:If you rebuild it, will they come? A mission to bring baseball back to Jacksonville's Glynlea

Supporters say it’s a good school — it was a B school, the last time grades were given — but it’s much more than that.

For the 36-year-old Jurney, it’s his boyhood home. His mother was an on-site police officer. They lived on the school grounds.

For the neighborhood, he says it’s one of three pillars — the school, the church, the park — that connect the neighborhoods of Holiday Hill, Glynlea and Grove Park.

Sitting in Holiday Hill Church, he points to the nearby school and says imagine drawing a circle one mile around it. In that circle, there are about 13,000 people. That sounds like a big neighborhood. But he says it feels like a small one. Some families have been here for generations. People leave and come back.  People here know each other. They look out for each other.

He believes this cohesiveness and stability can be traced to the three pillars. Especially the school. That, he says, is the main pillar.

It’s what brings people together in the first place and then keeps them together.

With that in mind, Jurney had 250 of the "Save Holiday Hill" signs made. Lee and Cates Glass made another 100.

“If the school shuts down, I believe you start to see a decline in the whole neighborhood,” Jurney said. “You’ll have people move, good people. And there’s going to be less of a way to keep the neighborhood close. In my opinion, it would be devastating.”

A shift to charter schools

One piece to this story — not just relating to Holiday Hill, but many of the potential closures — is the explosion of charter schools. More students and tax dollars going to charter schools has meant less students and tax dollars going to traditional public schools.

This is what some state and local politicians pushed for in the name of school choice. One consequence — some would say unintended, others would say it was quite intentional — is what is now happening to traditional public schools.

In the case of Holiday Hill, the district says 456 students were zoned for the elementary this last school year. Nearly 30 percent — 136 students — went to charters instead. More than 1 in 10, went to BridgePrep Academy of Duval, a K-8 charter that opened seven years ago about a mile from Holiday Hill on Atlantic Boulevard.

It’s one of 19 BridgePrep charters in the state. While the governing board is a not-for-profit corporation, there is a for-profit piece to the taxpayer-funded schools: Miami-based S.M.A.R.T. Management is paid to manage them.

As a magnet school, Holiday Hill added 231 students from beyond its zoning in the last school year, giving it an enrollment of 507. With a capacity of 660, that put its utilization at 77 percent — and that, along with the age of the building and growing cost of a rebuild, likely is what put the school that opened in 1959 on the list of potential closures.

Supporters say the capacity and utilization statistics aren't accurate, noting that Holiday Hill has eight classrooms with reduced capacity for PRIDE, a behavior management program. They say that this is an important program for the students and DCPS — and, if anything, it should enhance the school's status, not detract from it.

'It would be very heartbreaking'

Ashley Armentrout, 38, didn’t go to Holiday Hill Elementary. She grew up in Fort Caroline. But when she started dating her now husband, Doug, she fell in love with him and his neighborhood.

“I said, ‘I know it’s forward, but if we get married, we're living in the neighborhood,’” she said.

They’re on their second house in the neighborhood. They have two boys who not only attend Holiday Hill — Dalton is going into sixth grade, Landon is going into first — but went to kindergarten in the same classroom where their father went in the 1990s.

Those are the kinds of stories families have about Holiday Hill.

“It’s such a good school,” Armentrout said. “My children have learned so much. And everybody has just been wonderful, from the front desk to the teachers to the principal.”

Now when you arrive at the school off Altama Road, passing a row of “Save Holiday Hill” signs, there is another sign outside the front office that reminds people what they can do. It has three actions, complete with QR codes: 1. sign the petition, 2, join the SOS (Save Our School) Facebook group and 3. email the school board and mayor.

“To lose something that has been so good for the neighborhood and I think the city,” Armentrout said, “it would be very heartbreaking.”

Where would HHE students go?

If Holiday Hill Elementary closes, where would the neighborhood kids who go there now end up?

That's one of the questions parents and community members have been asking.

They've been told that traditional public school options could include Southsides Estates Elementary, one of the schools being rebuilt using the taxpayer-approved half-cent sales tax. The 94,000-square-foot new school will consolidate its current students with those from Windy Hill Elementary.

It will be much newer than the 65-year-old Holiday Hill. It also will be about 3 miles to the east, across Southside Boulevard.

Those fighting for Holiday Hill predict that if neighborhood kids go to another traditional public school — and they say that’s hardly a given, that parents might decide to go the charter or private route — it won’t be the same. The kids won’t walk to school or ride their bikes. And the school won’t be a part of their neighborhood the way Holiday Hill has been for generations.

Andrews, whose grandson now attends Holiday Hill, lives a couple of blocks from the house where he grew up, where his mother still lives. He owns a hot dog cart. And the last couple of years he has returned to his childhood elementary to serve hot dogs on Teacher Appreciation Day.

Last year it was raining so they moved it inside, near the library. He found an old scrapbook, from 1968, and turned to the page with Miss Scott’s class.

“There’s our class picture,” he said. “If you look at that picture, 70 percent of them still live in this neighborhood.”

He says that since they started hearing about Holiday Hill potentially closing, he’s heard maybe a dozen families say that if that happens, they’ll probably put their homes up for sale and move. 

“That’s why they moved here,” he said, “because of Holiday Hill School.”

In 2019, the district’s facilities plan called for replacing Holiday Hill with a new school at the same location. The projected cost was $20.5 million. By this March, the expected cost had risen to $45.6 million. That likely will keep going up.

These are the kinds of numbers that lead consultants to look for ways to consolidate small schools into larger ones. Supporters of Holiday Hill say numbers, including the utilization statistics, don’t take into account a lot of things — and that beyond that, a new school isn’t what’s most important to them. It’s having a neighborhood school.

“I'll use this analogy,” Jurney said. “So when you're at church, you'll hear pastors say, ‘The church is not the building. The church is the congregation.’ It's the same with this school. I can’t speak for other schools. But with this school, it’s the people in it, not the building.”

mwoods@jacksonville.com

(904) 359-4212