OIS Students Will Start Later When New School is Complete

By Alyssa Schnugg
News Editor
alyssa.schnugg@hottytoddy.com

To help keep drop-off and pick-up traffic down once the new Oxford Elementary School is built, students attending Oxford Intermediate will have a later start time.

Last week, the Oxford Planning Commission approved a special exception to allow the new OE school to be built next to OIS. Since the city’s zoning was changed last year, the area is now zoned Traditional Neighborhood Residential. A school is an allowed use if a special exception is granted.

The new school will be three stories high and, at about 89,400-square feet, will hold classes for first and second grades.

It will be built just west of OIS.

The commissioners and members of the planning department expressed some concerns about the amount of traffic backing up to Jackson Avenue and Washington Avenue, which is already reduced to a one-way road most afternoons during the school year.

The proposal for school drop off and pick up for the new school will be via North Fifth Street, which is accessed from Jackson Avenue. Parents wanting to pick up or drop off at the Intermediate School are stacking along Martin Luther King and Washington.

“Given the potential for long stacking lines and the need for weaving patterns for departures, the stacking plans must provide certainty that no traffic will back up North Fifth as far as Jackson Avenue,” according to the planning department’s comments in the proposal.

Casey Rogers, with Innovative Construction Management, told the commission that the Intermediate School and the new elementary school will have different start and stop times.

“The intermediate school will start later, similar to the middle and high school,” he said last week. “So the two traffic cycles will not be at the same time.”

The middle and high schools currently start at 8:20 a.m., while the elementary schools start at 7:40. Currently, the intermediate school starts at 7:35 a.m.

Commission chair Brian Hyneman said more details will be presented before the commission during the final site plan approval process.

“We can get into the minutia of the plan during site plan review,” he said. “Today’s vote is only on the special exception request.”