Closing A School

Newtown is growing older, and while collectively we don’t exactly qualify as “empty nesters,” local officials planning for the town’s future have noted the sharp decline in the number of young families. Between the census years of 2000 and 2010, the median age of Newtown advanced from 37.5 years to 42.9. And the two demographic groups most likely to have public school-aged children — 25- to 34-year-olds and 35- to 44-year olds — declined 36 and 25 percent, respectively. The resulting decline in the town’s school enrollments has quickened discussions by school and town officials of the possibility of closing one of Newtown’s schools.

Last spring, the school district’s Ad Hoc Facilities Review Committee presented a report that recommended when Newtown’s K–4 student population reaches 1,500 or fewer, the district should begin the process of closing an elementary school. Currently, the K–4 student population stands at 1,657 in the district, having declined by just under 500 in the last five to six years, according to school board chairman Debbie Leidlein. With continuing enrollment decline, the reality of a school closure is no more than a year or two away.

That reality already has parents in a state of protective vigilance for their respective elementary schools. Earlier this month, concerned parents from Head O’ Meadow School filled the school board’s meeting room on the mistaken impression that the board would be voting in the closure of their school. Clearly, any decision to close any school facility will be met with resistance.

Based on an analysis of facilities and available classrooms, the ad hoc facilities panel recommended last April that Newtown’s newest school, Reed Intermediate, be targeted for closing. Exactly how the various grades would be grouped and reconfigured in other existing school facilities remained a matter of speculation. Still, the Board of Education embraced these initial recommendations unanimously, despite many unanswered questions about how Reed School might be repurposed to fill some other town need, and whether such a shift in use would obligate the town to return some or all of the state school construction grants allocated for the Reed School.

The reason town and school officials are contemplating such a complex and politically fraught task as closing a school is that the efficiencies and cost savings that would accrue from such consolidation have the potential to save the town millions of dollars over time. And at a time when budget battles are won and lost in increments of $100,000 or $200,000, such savings could change the entire climate of local support for education.

As it faces this challenge, the community needs to be mindful, however, that more is at stake than buildings and bottom lines. Over the years, Newtown has put together a system of education that is aware and responsive to the developmental needs of its schoolchildren. The advent of the Reed Intermediate School as a facility devoted solely to grades 5 and 6, is one of the district’s crowing achievements in this regard. Segregating the education of children in these key transitional years in age-appropriate environments mitigates disciplinary problems and enhances instruction. As the Reed principal noted, it “keeps them younger longer.”

This kind of accommodation, along with so many other innovations developed onsite by educators and administrators trying year after year to better respond the needs of their students, needs to be recognized and preserved in any wholesale reshuffling of schoolchildren and facilities. Figuring out the logistics will be hard enough. Pulling it off in a way that does no harm will be the ultimate challenge.