BUCKLAND — Should the Mohawk Trail Regional School District move sixth-graders out of their respective elementary schools and bring them together for a combined sixth-grade class in the Mohawk Trail Regional Middle School?
That’s one scenario the Mohawk community has been looking into this year.
With enrollment declining and costs rising, a committee called Mohawk’s BEST (Building Education, Sustainability and Trust) has been visiting all four of Mohawk’s elementary schools to meet with school families and to look into new school configurations that could reduce district costs.
According to enrollment figures released for the budget this winter, between October 2010 and October 2015, enrollment from the Mohawk K-12 towns declined by 152 students for kindergarten through Grade 12.
On Wednesday, BEST will be meeting with the school board’s finance and school building subcommittees to review these options, their advantages and disadvantages for each elementary school in the district.
The meeting begins at 6 p.m. in the Superintendent’s Conference Room at Mohawk.
For now, are all very preliminary ideas that are being explored, said Mohawk Trail Regional School Committee Chairman Kirby “Lark” Thwing Jr. He said the BEST Committee is hoping to make recommendations to Mohawk member towns this winter that would both save the district money and expand educational opportunities for children — some of whom are now in classes of fewer than 10 children.
One reason for moving sixth-graders into one building is that it would give the children an chance for classes with specialized teachers in math, science, social studies, English and technology. They would have access to after-school activities, including sports, theater, band and chorus. And there would be more options for team-teaching and project-based, interdisciplinary learning.
Besides leaving schools as they are, here are some alternatives under consideration for the elementary schools.
Keep pre-kindergarten through Grade 2 students at Colrain Central, and move Grade 3 through 5 students to Buckland Shelburne Elementary (BSE).
Keep pre-kindergarten at Colrain Central and send the other grades to BSE.
Move all Colrain students to BSE, with Colrain Central becoming a “school within a school” inside BSE — much the way Rowe did temporarily, after the old Rowe school burned down.
The Buckland-Shelburne building is the largest elementary school building in the district. So another idea is to make BSE a pre-K through Grade 5 school, with students from other Mohawk towns coming for Grades 3 through 5. Sanderson Academy in Ashfield, Colrain Central and the Heath Elementary schools would become pre-K through Grade 2 schools in their towns, and Mohawk’s middle school would then serve Grades 6 through 8.
Another idea is for BSE and Sanderson to serve pre-K through Grade 5, with Colrain and Heath educating only pre-kindergarten students within their buildings. But, if Heath joins the Hawlemont Regional School District for elementary education, then Heath, Hawley and Charlemont children would join Mohawk at Grade 7.
Former Mohawk School Committee chairman Robert Aeschback used to say that all of the district’s roughly 1,000 students could be educated within the middle/high school building on Route 112. So another idea is to form a new central pre-K through Grade 5 school within the spacious Mohawk Trail Regional School building, while the middle- and high school students would be in a separate part of the building.
Another possibility would be to move all the BSE students to the middle/high school building and leave the other elementary schools to serve pre-K through Grade 5 students in their respective towns. All would come to Mohawk for Grade 6 through 8 middle school and Grade 9 through 12 high school.