Renovations to begin this month on Audubon’s Broadway campus, while Banneker Elementary prepares move to Hollygrove

Renovations on Audubon Charter School’s Broadway campus are scheduled to begin this month, neighbors learned Wednesday night, while Benjamin Banneker prepares to move to a new campus in Hollygrove. Audubon Charter School moved its classrooms out of the Broadway campus to a temporary location in Gentilly over the winter holidays in anticipation of the renovations. The modular building that were behind the Broadway building have been removed, and renovations should start later this month, said Orleans Parish School Board member Woody Koppel on Wednesday at the spring meeting of the Uptown Triangle Neighborhood Association. The project is still on track for students to return by fall of 2013, Koppel said, and when they do, they will find one of the best school buildings in the city. “Everything in that facility will be replaced other than the exterior walls and the hardwood floors,” Koppel said.

Johnson supporters take another stand for Priestley site; dual high school plan for Booker T. Washington campus questioned

Supporters of Johnson Elementary took another passionate stand in support of the school’s move to the more desirable site of the old Priestley campus during a Recovery School District public hearing Wednesday evening, while Booker T. Washington supporters questioned a plan to tear down and rebuild most of that historic building to house two separate high schools, including a charter-run version of Walter L. Cohen. Two deputy superintendents promised the Carrollton neighborhood leaders that they would be involved in an upcoming feasibility study of the Priestley site. To questions about the plans for Booker T. Washington plan, they replied only that nothing is final and that they are continuing to hear concerns from the community. Johnson | Moving a steadily-improving educational program at James Weldon Johnson Elementary into a more prestigious, safer location at the old Priestley campus has been a top priority for members of the Carrollton-Riverbend Neighborhood Association, and the half-dozen proponents of the idea dominated the small crowd at Thursday’s public hearing. The latest facilities plan calls for an engineering study to determine the cost differences between renovating Johnson’s current campus versus building at the Priestley site, and association president Anne Wolfe Nicolay insisted that neighborhood members be involved in the actual studying — not just given a report to read and react to afterward.

KIPP on South Carrollton headed to Gentilly, Banneker to Hollygrove, RSD says

KIPP Believe College Prep on South Carrollton is headed to a new school building in Gentilly, and Benjamin Banneker Elementary in the Riverbend is slated for a new campus in Hollygrove, according to school assignment plans being aired publicly by the Recovery School District this week. Those two changes are the most significant for Uptown campuses among the recommendations that the RSD will be hosting public hearings on this week. Many other RSD schools around Uptown will essentially be unaffected, and some of the higher-profile schools run through the Orleans Parish School Board are not included in the list. KIPP’s highest-performing middle school, KIPP Believe College Prep, is slated for the old Stuart Bradley site on Humanity Street just off Interstate 610, where one of the city’s new $22.5 million school buildings will be constructed from FEMA money. The move will leave its current site, the McNair High School campus on the corner of South Carrollton and Birch, as an “opportunity” campus — suitable as a temporary site while another campus is being renovated, but not slated for any renovations or long-term assignments itself.