CHAPEL HILL – Glenwood Elementary school is already beyond capacity, and next year the school will go beyond its current numbers.

In order to discuss the best plan of attack to mitigate the problem, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools district is trying a new style of meeting to discuss the options called a Focused Dialogue.

“It’s very hard to have a conversation with 10,000 elementary school parents,” says the district’s assistant superintendent for support services, Todd LoFrese.. “We’re trying to have a workable group to get representation from the school and to be able to have a conversation around that topic.”

LoFrese says students are going to have to be moved next year. On Monday, district officials, teachers, school administrators, and members of the PTA will meet in small groups to go over the variety of ways to move the students.

“Either spot redistricting or moving the Mandarin Dual-Language program to a larger school, consideration of creating another magnet school, and then there’s a series of other options,” LoFrese says. “But, they all involve moving students. It could be done in phases, it could be done all at once, and so each of those has different pros and cons in terms of how you do it.”

While only a handful of people will be directly commenting on the options Monday, LoFrese says everyone interested will have a chance to get involved.

“We’ll have an electronic way for people to submit feedback and input,” LoFrese says. “There’s also all the other ways that people have been communicating with administration through email or phone calls, to the schools through School Improvement Teams meetings, and then directly to the school board either electronically or by participating in public participation at board meetings.”

Monday’s meeting is being held Monday at 6:00 p.m. at EastChapel HillHigh School. The meeting is open to the public.

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