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Dear Decaturish,

I do not envy the job of Superintendent Horton, DeKalb County Board of Education members, or other individuals tasked with the difficult decision regarding the future of Druid Hills High School. In life, you will never please everyone. I just want to share my own thoughts on the modernization plan for Druid Hills High School and its future.

I am Kai Uchimura. I am a history teacher and girls’ varsity soccer coach at Druid Hills High School, and I have been here since the 2018-2019 school year. Regarding the modernization plans and the future of Druid Hills High School, I firmly believe that It should be relocated to a new facility. In my opinion, that facility should be the DeKalb Arts Academy, which was previously named the DeKalb Elementary School of the Arts and also used to be Avondale Middle School. 

The reason why is that they have a better capacity to support a high school appropriately. Druid Hills High School currently sits on about 11 acres of land compared to 30 acres of other high schools in the district. Only about 550 students are at the current DeKalb Arts Academy (DAA) in a facility that can hold way more students. There is already an athletic field at the DeKalb Arts Academy. As a coach, it is very inconvenient for my players and me to travel from Druid Hills High School to Druid Hills Middle School to practice; track, soccer, and baseball are all affected by this.

Having proper athletic facilities at our school would be more equitable to our student-athletes, who do not have the resources to have reliable transportation to get to practices.

It would make sense to send DeKalb School of the Arts(DSA) students, who currently sit in a building that used to be Avondale High School, to the Druid Hills High School Building and make the building into a strictly K-12 Performing Arts School. This would open up the old Avondale High School building into another educational facility of some kind (maybe another career academy or high school to help relieve the overcrowding at Clarkston High School). DSA only has about 300 students, so if you add 300 students from DSA and 550 from DAA you would have about 900 students, give or take, to be relocated into the Druid Hills High School Building, which would still be about 500 students fewer than what the current student population is at Druid Hills High School which is roughly 1,450 students.

This move could save the district money just tearing down the gym at Druid Hills High School, and not worrying about building a new gym there because it would just be a Performing Arts School. Of course, the Druid Hills High School building would still need updates, but worrying about a gym or athletic facilities wouldn’t be stressful. The district would need to update the DeKalb Arts Academy building to accommodate a high school in terms of classroom sizes, but I would not think it would cost more money than the current modernization ideas.  

There are, of course, challenges in thinking about attendance zones in the future. Still, based on what the current attendance zone for Druid Hills High School is, the swap to DAA would make sense because it would be a more central location to most of the student population at Druid Hills High School, which would be Scottdale and Avondale Estates. This kind of swap would, without a doubt, upset families that live in the current neighborhood surrounding Druid Hills School, like Durand Mill area, because it takes away the convenience of their students being able to walk to school. But students in surrounding neighborhoods make up a minority of the students who attend Druid Hills High School.

Another idea would be to build another high school next to Adams Stadium because the district owns the land next to it, but that’s a topic for a future letter to the editor. Whatever decision is made, you will not please everybody and politics will be involved. I do not envy anyone currently involved with reviewing school attendance zones.

The whole process and timeline for modernization coming to fruition might take nearly half a decade or even longer, and the current students at Druid Hills High School would not see any changes. Whenever that time comes to decide the future of Druid Hills High School, the district must do what is best for the kids and the future students who will attend. 

— Kai Uchimura

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