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School year off to a smooth start
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Students file off a bus at Robinson Elementary on Thursday to begin the new school year. - photo by David Renner Dawson Community News

The Dawson County school system is rounding out the first full week of the 2013-14 school year and things couldn't have gone better, according to administrators.

"I've had several principals tell me already at how smoothly the first few days went," said Dawson County Superintendent Keith Porter.

Added Dawson County High School Principal Jute Wilson: "It's been as smooth a start as I've ever been a part of. By day two, everybody was in and out on schedule."

Dawson County Middle School also had a pleasant start, according to Principal Mark Merges.

"It seems like the students didn't even leave. Everything flowed really well for us the first few days," he said. "The kids are great and teachers are already engaging them."

It was a similar situation over at Robinson Elementary.

"It has been the smoothest year that I have ever had, and this is my 30th year," said Principal Roxanne Fausett. "It has been so smooth and everybody has been so wonderful.

"Teachers came back and got to work. The kids came back ready to learn. I've been very pleased."

While everything seemed to flow well for the schools and their administrators, the parents did hit a snag early in the week.

"We had a couple of traffic flow situations in the Perimeter Road area that we had to address on the first couple of days, but those seem to be going smoothly now," Porter said.

"Transportation seems to be going very smoothly, which is always a concern until the kids get used to the pick-up schedule again."

The issue was due, in part, to a time-change experiment at Robinson.

"We had a couple days of traffic because we changed our start time to 7:30 a.m., so we were checking that out for a couple of days," Fausett said.

"It was backing up traffic too much, so we had to back our time up to 7:15. Since then, that problem has been alleviated."

Enrollment is up in the local school system, according to Porter, and stands at 3,402 students.

Porter says the system expects the numbers to increase until the week after Labor Day. By then, any students entering or leaving the district should be settled.