The Jefferson R-7 School District has announced a new long-term plan called One Campus Vision that aims to ultimately consolidate all grades, kindergarten through 12th grade, to a single location. The district now has four school buildings on separate sites.
The community is invited to a work session to learn about and discuss the topic at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 19, in the Performing Arts Center at Jefferson High School.
“We are very early in the process; there is no timeline or cost estimates for anything yet,” district Superintendent David Haug said. “But we want to engage the community in this process. It’s smart to bring people in and talk things over before we just start acting.”
Haug said having all the grades on a single campus would solve some of the challenges that have been growing over the past several years. Chief among those is the safety of students and families being transported between buildings as traffic volume grows with the addition of commercial and residential developments in the district, not to mention new road projects.
“These things have been talked about for years. We’re not pulling things magically out of the air,” he said. “In the past few years, though, all the proposed road changes have forced us to look at this more closely.
“We can do all the changes we want here, but to ensure real success we have to advocate for this community with the neighboring communities, the county and with MoDOT going forward. And we want to be as transparent as possible about what’s going on. As one of our older residents has said, ‘This community does not like surprises.’”
Growing pains
The R-7 district was established 75 years ago with the reorganization of four small local schools. The first building, now called Plattin Primary, was built in 1949 at the corner of Hwy. 61 and Plattin School Road. It currently houses students in kindergarten through second grade.
Danby-Rush Tower Middle School was built in 1968 on the south side of Dooling Hollow Road, just off Hwy. 61 about 2 miles south of the Plattin building. It was expanded in 1990 to add additional classrooms, a library and a gymnasium. The facility houses students in grades six through eight, as well as the district administrative offices.
Telegraph Intermediate was built in 1993 just across Dooling Hollow and expanded in 2016. It houses students in grades three through five, as well as the district’s preschool program.
Jefferson High School was built in 2009, just east of Selma Baptist Church on Blue Jay Way, after district patrons narrowly approved a bond issue that took the district from one that just served students in kindergarten through eighth grade to a full K-12 system. The first year saw only freshmen, and a class was added each year until a full complement was achieved in fall 2012. The class of 2013 was the first graduating class.
The building was expanded in 2016 to include a performing arts center and additional classrooms and storage.
Traffic congestion, especially at the Dooling Hollow/Hwy. 61 intersection, has been a top-priority concern for the past few years. The following developments have only added to the problem.
■ In early 2022, the R-7 board was poised to place a bond issue on the ballot that would have funded developing an entrance into the high school complex directly from Hwy. 61, relieving some of the traffic issues. But the announcement of the imminent closure of the Ameren Rush Island plant caused the board to table the issue indefinitely.
■ Around that same time, the Missouri Department of Transportation announced a project to widen I-55 to three lanes from Pevely to south of Festus, and municipal and county officials began discussing possible changes to Exit 170 at Hwy. 61.
■ Also, the James Hardie company announced plans to build a $400 million manufacturing plant in Crystal City, on property that lies within the R-7 school boundaries, and to improve roads in the R-7 area to eventually carry truck traffic from the plant.
“There have been growing concerns about the traffic congestion we’re seeing,” Haug said. “Having buildings on different sides of I-55 means we have buses going on and off Hwy. 61 in a congested area at busy times. We’re concerned, too, about getting fire or ambulance vehicles into our campus.
“Having all the buildings on one campus, taking the traffic mostly out of play, would be huge.”
Haug said district officials have worked to minimize traffic by adjusting schedules and staggering start times.
“But you can only do so much with that,” he said. “We are going to need to make some physical changes.
“I want to make clear that, as the phases start to be implemented, we’ll continue to maximize what we can do. We have to see what makes sense as far as what goes where, what grades go into what buildings. I want this all to make sense for this community. We’re not trying to surprise anybody; we just need to be ready. Prepared communities win.”