WARWICK — Warwick Community School will be seeking volunteers to help fill in for positions that were reduced or removed during the Pioneer Valley Regional School District’s efforts to balance its budget.
The volunteering will be coordinated by the Parent Teacher Organization. The Warwick School Preservation Committee will also put a notice with more information in the town’s September newsletter, and members will be available at Old Home Days for information about the committee and volunteer opportunities.
“Our goal with the PTO this year is to combine the community and the school together,” said Myndi Elwood, president of the Parent Teacher Organization. “(The PTO) is a volunteer group. It’s to volunteer in classrooms. This year, we’re going to need it more.”
The effort to find more volunteers came out of meetings of the Warwick Community School Preservation Committee, a group of Warwick residents and others concerned about the school’s future. The committee began meeting in July with the purpose of investigating all options for preserving Warwick’s school, should the Pioneer Valley Regional School Committee pursue the closing of schools.
Volunteer jobs will likely include office work like answering phones and doing paperwork to coordinate field trips, said Tom Ziniti, a special education teacher at Warwick Community School and a member of the Warwick Community School Preservation Committee.
The committee has also discussed the possibility of using volunteers for curricular work that was removed in the district’s budget cuts. Notably, fourth-graders will no longer have a band music program. The committee floated ideas for having some kind of supplemental, volunteer-based music program for fourth-graders instead.
Members of the School Preservation Committee and the PTO are still determining exactly what jobs can be done by volunteers and how volunteer work will be scheduled.
People interested in volunteering can contact Tom Ziniti at zinitit@pvrsdk12.org.