Wichita school board approves special transfer of Southeast High students at semester

The Wichita school board voted unanimously Monday to authorize the special transfer of up to 260 Southeast High School students to Heights High for the start of the spring semester in an effort to alleviate disruptive overcrowding.

Current Southeast students will not be required to switch schools if they don’t want to, but the district boundary change approved by the BOE means future students from within the Adams, College Hill, Jackson and Price-Harris Elementary boundaries will now attend Heights instead of Southeast.

The district will not be able to provide spring transportation to students who choose to transfer to Heights at semester, and because of special transfer rules, student-athletes will not be able to compete in varsity spring sports.

The district plans to contact families of the 260 students to notify them of their options in the next week.

Completed in 2016, Southeast is USD 259’s newest high school. The school’s functional building capacity is 1,982 students. This year, Southeast enrolled 2,192 students, the second most of any Wichita high school behind East.

Southeast staff say classrooms that were designed to hold 25 students now routinely cram in at least 35.

“Building and classroom safety due to overcrowding at Southeast is a problem that will continue to harm students and faculty at Southeast until we do something about it,” debate teacher Michael Harris told the board of education last month.

Superintendent Alicia Thompson acknowledged before the vote that the district will need to do more in the future to prevent overcrowding at Southeast.

“This is definitely not the solution for Southeast. This is just something to try to do something temporarily in short-term,” Thompson said. “We know that there are definitely long-term plans that need to be made.”

The district has already approved 20 special transfers to Northeast Magnet this year, district staff said.

Before recommending the boundary change, staff held eight listening sessions with various stakeholder groups at Southeast, Heights and Northeast Magnet.

This story was originally published November 7, 2022 at 7:54 PM.