by Erin McNelis

At last month’s meeting of the Council Rock School Board, Capital Planning Committee members suggested that closing Wrightstown Elementary School within a few years could contribute to the solution of some of the districts economic problems. In response, residents of the school district have formed a campaign to encourage board members to consider other possibilities.

Committee members made three presentations based on a year of research that the school board asked the committee conduct with an eye to several district problems including aging infrastructure, declining enrollment, changes in government infrastructure requirements, and the rising educational cost per student. Within each proposal made, the closing of Wrightstown Elementary School was put forward as a possibility.

The school, which was built in 1958, is the district’s second oldest school and the smallest. Those alone are not the reasons for the proposed closing. However, the presentations did state that the school is the most inefficient. Other reasons for the recommendation for closure were that it wouldn’t require much money to close and that the district could then repurpose the property to hold programs that are currently being housed in a rental property. Thought was also given to the students, as the entire school population could be moved together to another elementary school.

Of course, when a proposal is made to close a school, members of the community are affected. One of those members, Amy McIntyre, has started a petition on change.org and the Facebook page, Save Wrightstown Elementary School, to ask the school board to consider options that do not include closing the school. She bought her home five years ago so that her children would attend Wrightstown Elementary. “It is small, one of the top academically performing schools in the district, and it is the heart of Wrightstown Township,” explains McIntyre. “The benefits of small schools have been widely studied and documented.”

The petition cites several studies, including a Harvard University paper published in 2004 that found evidence supporting size as a determining factor in academic achievement. The research says that small schools are safer, offer a more challenging learning environment, and that they foster greater satisfaction for parents, teachers, and the community. Also mentioned in the petition is a statement from the National Education Association that names raised student achievement and elevated teacher satisfaction as reciprocals of smaller size.

McIntyre and her supporters plan to offer up alternatives to closing the school, but are right now focused on raising awareness. “Most of the community had no idea this was being proposed,” says McIntyre. “So the first step is to have the board understand that there is significant opposition within the district to closing this school.”  So far, almost 750 people have signed the petition, and the facebook page has received 436 likes with over 100 comments.

While the Capital Planning Committee did not specifically address the exact size of Newtown Elementary School, the school where the Wrightstown Elementary School students would go if the closing occurs, more than one presenter spoke of the drop in enrollment in general throughout the district. It was also brought up that elementary school populations currently range from 300 to 800 students, and under the proposed plan, they would strive for about 700 students per school across the district.

School board president Wendi Thomas stressed that this was just a preliminary discussion of the subject to report the committee’s findings, and that the board would discuss the matter again at the July 17th school board meeting to be held at 7:30 p.m. at The Chancellor Center Board Room, 30 N. Chancellor Street, Newtown.

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