AMHERST – The Amherst School Committee voted unanimously Monday to move forward with two draft statements of interest asking the Massachusetts School Building Authority for funding to replace two aging elementary schools.
The plan is to replace Wildwood and Fort River elementary schools with one building of roughly 600 students with either kindergarten through fifth grade or kindergarten through sixth grade. Combining both schools as they exist today would result in about 750 students, so proposals to keep the enrollment at 600 — such as putting the sixth grade in the middle school – have been floated but not finalized.
There are two statements of interest, one for each school, because the MSBA requires an application for each building that will be addressed, according to Amherst School Committee Chair Anastasia Ordonez.
The location of the project has not yet been decided, Ordonez said.
Superintendent Michael Morris put forth the plan in January and since then the district held six listening sessions with a facilitator for the public. A report from those meetings is publicly available.
In 2013, the district was granted $34 million from the MSBA to fund a $66.37 million project that would have constructed two elementary schools at the Wildwood site. But the Town Meeting did not approve its portion of the funding, and a townwide vote in March of 2017 that could have overridden the decision failed.
Applications submitted last year to the MSBA were rejected.
“I think we’ve heard loudly there is still a small but a segment of the population who is not yet convinced this is the best proposal and have concerns beyond working out the details,” said school committee member Kerry Spitzer. The committee should engage with them and highlight the importance of the problem, she said. “Whatever we can do to make that consensus as broad as possible; I’m fully for working on that.”
At a school committee meeting on March 7, Andrea Battle, a retired teacher, spoke about her concerns.
“This is still a big school,” Battle said. “I do think we should have been discussing more than one option together.”
Battle said if the committee voted in the draft, a group of people may send a statement to the MSBA expressing their concerns. Morris has previously said that the MSBA is specifically looking for more community agreement on the project.
Jean Fay, president of the Amherst-Pelham Education Association, spoke at the March 11 meeting about the need to address the deteriorating schools.
“The educators in Amherst are committed to having safe and healthy schools,” Fay said. “We are united in the feeling that we need to do something, the situation is dire. We are hopeful that the MSBA process will continue.”
The two statements of interest now go to the Town Council, which will be discussing the issue at its meeting on March 18 and is expected to take a vote on April 1.
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com