Taylor elementary schools will soon more resemble the more traditional model used in most cities in Texas. At the March 20 meeting of the Taylor Independent School District Board, trustees unanimously approved a facility assessment committee’s proposal developed about a year and a half ago to have two comprehensive elementary schools starting this fall rather than the “stacked” model currently in place.
“In that proposal, they made the recommendation that T.H. Johson (Elementary School) remains a Pre-K through Kinder campus, and Main Street Intermediate and Naomi Pasemann (Elementary schools) become grades one through five,” said Superintendent Devin Padavil at the meeting. “Over the last semester, we have held town halls and created surveys for families to give input on in order to give feedback on a draft proposal we put before the community.”
Currently, the district has students starting their education at T.H. Johnson from prekindergarten through first grade, then moving up to Naomi Pasemann for second through fourth grades, and finishing up at Main Street Intermediate School for fifth grade.
Padavil said the new attendance zones would give Main Street Intermediate about 550 students and Pasemann 517 to start with next school year.
“That gives Pasemann a lot of room for growth, as it also basically captures that entire area down (F.M.) 973 and everything west of Taylor,” he said.
One main concern for community members during the public input process was preserving demographic equity between the two schools, Padavil said.
“The free and reduced lunch percentages of the campuses at Main Street would be 68 percent and Pasemann would be 70 percent,” Padavil said. “That aligns with the desires of the community to make sure that both campuses were demographically (even).”
After the meeting, Padavil said it was important to the district to maintain this equality between the zones.
“We did not want one school to be more affluent than the other school, and we wanted both schools to represent the demographics of Taylor as the city is laid out now,” Padavil said.
