WARWICK — Leaving the Pioneer Valley Regional School District has come up with the Selectboard before, but the first major step towards actually doing it came this week, when the board established a new advisory committee for finding out what options exist and how they would work.
The advisory committee’s first meeting is Tuesday, 6:45 p.m. at Town Hall. Chairing the group will be Adam Holloway, a Warwick resident who has helped organize a not-officially-recognized group called the Warwick Education Task Force. Several other members of the Task Force expressed interest in working on the new advisory committee, but membership is not fully decided yet, Holloway said.
“The short of it is, as with the Task Force, to preserve Warwick’s school,” Holloway said.
The reason to leave Pioneer would be ongoing talk among the Pioneer School Committee and district administrators of closing Warwick Community School. The Warwick Selectboard has been unequivocal in its opposition to that idea, board members reasoning that the loss of the school would make the town less attractive to young families and would reduce property values.
The opposite argument, made by district administrators and some School Committee members, is that Pioneer’s business model is unsustainable. This became apparent last spring, when the district found out it had a deficit worth about $450,000. Talk of school closures as a way to economize began soon thereafter, and so far has resulted in the closure of Leyden’s Pearl Rhodes Elementary School.
A proposal to close Warwick Community School was rejected by the School Committee at the same meeting in March when it voted to close Leyden’s school. The issue reared its head again two weeks ago, when the School Committee attempted to formally reconsider its decision not to close Warwick’s school. The motion to reconsider failed in a 5-5 vote.
Notably, Superintendent Jon Scagel, when pressed for a recommendation on the question by committee member David Young (also Warwick’s town administrator), said the committee should “lean towards closing.” This was the first that Scagel had publicly taken a position on the question.
School Budget Subcommittee Chairman Mike Townsley said that, after the second vote failed, it is now too late in the year for the School Committee to close Warwick in time for September. So Warwick Community School is guaranteed to be open at least through the 2019-2020 school year.
The Warwick Selectboard and Finance Committee both expect the question to come up again next year, and would prefer to avoid it altogether. Hence the new advisory committee: if Warwick can secure a way to leave Pioneer at the end of next June, Pioneer can’t close the town’s school.
The window of time for the advisory committee to get its information together is narrower than that, Holloway said, based on conversations he and other Education Task Force members have had with the state Department of Education. Whatever new situation Warwick wants to move into, the paperwork has to be done and cleared with the Department of Education by Dec. 31.
“This is an extremely, extremely important task, as far as the future of Warwick and Warwick Community School,” Selectboard Chairman Doc Pruyne said. “I don’t know of anything in the recent past that’s been more important.”
Beyond Pioneer, Warwick has at least three options that the Education Task Force has researched, Holloway said.
■Warwick could join Ralph C. Mahar Regional School District. In that case, Warwick Community School would be one of several elementary schools that feed into a regional 7-12 school in Orange — a setup similar to what Warwick has with Pioneer. But with Mahar Superintendent Tari Thomas having recently announced her retirement, that district may be reluctant to take on the major project of absorbing a new town, Holloway said.
■Warwick could join Union 28, an elementary-only district that comprises Erving, Leverett, Shutesburry, New Salem and Wendell. Those towns have control of their elementary schools, but the district does not include a high school. It’s left up to the towns to make their own arrangements for their students in grades 7 through 12, typically through some sort of agreement with a neighboring district.
■Warwick Community School could be turned into a charter school or some other quasi-public school model. This has been the least popular idea, Holloway said.
■There’s also the option of staying with Pioneer — but, Holloway said, Warwick would probably want a guarantee that the school would stay open; and that it wouldn’t be strip-mined, as the School Committee seemed to have done when it voted in April to cancel Warwick Community School’s combined kindergarten and pre-school classroom, due to too-low enrollment.
“It’s probably easier to work it out than to cleave and leave,” Holloway said. “But if it doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t. If it’s not working for both parties, I don’t see why we shouldn’t make a fair and equitable split.”
Reach Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-772-0261 ex 261.