AMHERST — After voters last month failed to approve construction of twin elementary schools at the current Wildwood School site, the Amherst School Committee appears ready to begin moving forward on improving the town’s elementary schools.
At Tuesday’s School Committee meeting, interim Superintendent Michael Morris laid out some of the enrollment, financial and infrastructure challenges facing the district’s schools, including the presentation of seven potential scenarios for either renovating or rebuilding Fort River and Wildwood schools.
“I think there was an attempt to begin the conversation, in my perspective, to sort of break the ice on moving forward,” School Committee member Vira Douangmany Cage, an opponent of the plan for co-located Wildwood schools, said Wednesday. “I’d like to see it as a starting point to a conversation that we’re going to be having with the community.”
All seven scenarios are more expensive for the town than the rejected Wildwood plan would have been, partly because of escalation in construction costs and low interest rates that are likely to rise, but also because the Wildwood project was slated to receive $34 million from the Massachusetts School Building Authority.
The first step in finding an alternative path forward is the funding of a full feasibility study at the Fort River site, which the School Committee will be petitioning Town Meeting to consider.
Phoebe Hazzard, who was named School Committee chairwoman on Tuesday, and committee member Eric Nakajima will present the panel’s thoughts to the Joint Capital Planning Committee on Friday.
To cover the anticipated $700,000 price tag on the feasibility study, advocates who supported the rejected $66.37 million Wildwood project are urging the School Committee to ask Town Meeting to redirect $500,000 meant for a new boiler at Wildwood School to fund the study.
“Our group is basically saying, ‘Yes, it would be more than inconvenient to have the boiler fail, because it would mean Wildwood would be closed for a day, two days, three days,’” said Johanna Neumann, who co-chaired the now defunct Vote Yes for Amherst coalition and is a Fort River mother. “But we believe that is a risk worth taking because in the long run it gets our kids out of schools that are fundamentally flawed.”
Neumann said she hopes the process moves quickly. “The longer we delay, the more the costs will go up,” she said.
Hazzard said the boiler money would be part of the conversation about how to fund the study, but there are a lot of unknowns that come with that proposal.
The boiler could outlast expectations, but will eventually have to be dealt with. Hazzard said there would be no safety risk if the boiler wasn’t replaced, and that there is concern about putting half a million dollars into a building that could be torn down in the coming years.
But regardless of how, or if, Town Meeting funds a full feasibility study, what will be done at the Fort River and Wildwood sites is a question that will remain unanswered for the moment.
Whatever happens at both sites, however, Morris stressed in his presentation Tuesday that the need for a solution is clear.
As part of a 2014 statewide survey of educators, only 24 percent of Wildwood teachers and 9 percent of Fort River teachers agreed with the statement that “the physical environment of classrooms in this school supports teaching and learning,” compared with 93 percent of teachers at Crocker Farm.
Also discussed at Tuesday’s meeting were financial and enrollment problems facing the district.
One big challenge facing Amherst’s elementary schools is the fact that, seven years since the town’s last redistricting, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at each of the three elementary schools is becoming unequal again.
Other enrollment issues that Morris brought up included having to bus students in special education programs to schools outside their enrollment zone, and lack of space at Crocker Farm.
Some big ideas were thrown out as potential fixes to enrollment issues, including possible redistricting or the creation of an in-district, dual-language “school of choice.”
However, Hazzard stressed that those ideas aren’t yet being considered, and are just some options that officials are brainstorming.
Any idea, she said, would involve significant community engagement before it was considered.
“It’s interesting to sort of at least open the door to exploring alternative types of solutions,” she said.
In his presentation, Morris also addressed financial worries, ranging from the lack of operational savings given the rejected Wildwood project to underfunded charter school reimbursements from the state.
Morris will be bringing his full presentation to the three schools’ parent-guardian organizations in the coming days and weeks.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.