For a few weeks parents of students at Eastvalley Elementary School have been organizing to protest what they call “deplorable” conditions at the 13 trailers located there.
On Thursday, they formally took their complaints to the Cobb Board of Education.
Five parents spoke during the public comment session, urging the board to provide newer trailers while Eastvalley awaits a new campus.
“We are maxed out to the point where we have lost our supplemental computer lab and we’re at risk for losing our foundation-funded supplemental science teacher because he no longer has a trailer,” said Cristine Morris, a mother of two Eastvalley students and the president of the school foundation.
She said the school has experienced eight percent year-over-year enrollment growth in recent years, prompting the science teacher to vacate a trailer to make room for a traditional classroom.
“What is the timeline for building a new school?” Morris asked. “And what, if any, are the county’s plans for year-over-year growth in the meantime?
Board members didn’t respond (they rarely do during public comment sessions).
Eastvalley, located on Roswell Road, has an enrollment of more than 700 students in buildings designed for less than half that. The 13 trailers there house roughly a third of the present enrollment, and Morris said that figure is more than twice the number of trailers at other schools in the Cobb district.
Eastvalley is slated for a new campus on the former site of East Cobb Middle School on Holt Road in the new Cobb Ed-SPLOST V, but no construction timetable has been established.
The SPLOST sales tax collection period began in January and continues through the end of 2023.
The trailers in use at Eastvalley now are old, some more than 30 years, as parents pointed out to the school board.
Miranda Philbin, the mother of a third-grader whose classroom is a trailer, said she understands that continuing use of trailers is inevitable while a new school is planned.
But the trailers have “mold, rotting stairs and crumbling structures,” among other conditions. “They are cramped in a tiny space like sardines,” she said of the students in the trailers.
“Thirty-five percent of our students do not have access to 21st century technology,” said Mike Fung-A-Wing, the father of two Eastvalley students. Safety issues include teachers and students not being able to hear messages in the trailers because there’s no intercom access.
Parent Jason Templeton asked that the district provide another trailer for the science class that has been displaced, “although I’m not sure where we’d put it, given our space constraints. I don’t understand why we can’t be provided with newer, larger trailers.
“‘No capital improvements’ was the statement we were provided years ago, and we’ve waited patiently. But we’ve done so to the detriment of our students and our teachers,” Templeton said.
Russell Sauve, the father of an Eastvalley fifth grader, said “we want what is bragged about on the Cobb school website, that Cobb schools is the best place to teach, lead and learn. Thirty-five percent of our students are not in a secure place to teach and learn.
“You are putting 286 children in unsecure, moldy, physically unsafe trailers every day,” he said. “We need you to bring these trailers up to a safe and secure standard while we wait for a new building to be built.”
Eastvalley is one of three elementary schools to be rebuilt in the current SPLOST. Cobb school officials said the first of those priorities is at Harmony Leland in Mableton, where construction is currently underway.
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