Rock Hill to host school choice fairs, accept applications

The Rock Hill school district will host informational fairs for families who want to learn about schools of choice as it begins accepting applications.

The district plans two school choice fairs for families and students, from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday at Clinton College and from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at Sullivan Middle School.

Rich Melzer, Rock Hill executive director of choice schools, said families who attend the choice fairs will be able to sign up to tour the choice programs.

“Parents can sign up for as many as they like,” Melzer said.

The online application period for choice opens Saturday and continues through April 29. Melzer said the application will be placed on the district website during or after Saturday’s fair.

Melzer said the district is working to provide more information about choice schools.

“In the past, we didn’t recruit as hard because some of the schools couldn’t take more kids or we didn’t have transportation for the kids,” he said.

Superintendent Kelly Pew has recommended that the district provide school bus transportation to students who attend a choice school outside their zoned school.

“The hope is this year, with offering transportation, that we can increase the number of people that come to the fair,” Melzer said. “And it will give us kind of a gauge of what programs we need to look at in the future.”

Families who apply for school choice programs will be notified of acceptance into the programs during the first week of May.

Melzer said if a program has more applicants than it can enroll, applicants will be placed in a lottery where names are chosen randomly by a computer program.

He said overflow numbers could serve as a guide for future programs.

“You can get a sense of where we need to put more programs,” he said. “If we have a program where people are dying to get into and they can’t get into, maybe that’s a place where we need to design another program or have that program in another school.”

Rock Hill school choice programs and their locations are:

▪  Accelerated Studies, for grades kindergarten to 5, at Sunset Park Elementary School. Three classes at the school, in grades three to five, are for students who have qualified through test scores for gifted and talented services.

▪  Arts integration, for grades kindergarten to 5, at Northside Elementary School.

▪  International Baccalaureate, for grades kindergarten to 12, at Rosewood Elementary, Sullivan Middle and at Rock Hill, Northwestern and South Pointe high schools.

▪  Inquiry, for grades three to five, at Ebenezer Avenue Elementary School.

▪  Language Immersion, in Spanish or French, for grades kindergarten to 5, at Ebinport and Richmond Drive elementary schools for Spanish and Rosewood Elementary for French.

▪  Montessori, for grades pre-kindergarten to 2, at the Children’s School at Sylvia Circle.

▪  STEAM, for grades kindergarten to 12, at Oakdale Elementary, Saluda Trail Middle and South Pointe High schools.

This story was originally published March 8, 2016 at 4:22 PM with the headline "Rock Hill to host school choice fairs, accept applications."