WARWICK — Three likely options for maintaining Warwick Community School with or without the Pioneer Valley Regional School District have been identified by the Selectboard’s advisory committee on the elementary school.
Yet, if Warwick is to leave Pioneer in time for the start of the 2020 to 2021 school year, all the business of securing the new arrangement and wrapping things up with Pioneer has to be finished by Dec. 31.
“It’s quite a bit to accomplish in six months,” said state Department of Education Deputy Commissioner Jeff Wulfson. “Typically decisions around regionalizing or withdrawing from regions take years. Six months would be extraordinary.”
Committee members know the timeline is ambitious, Chairman Adam Holloway said. But: “The option of the School Committee closing us next year is not an option for us,” he said. “Warwick is not the community that’s going to roll over and just get things taken over. We have a core group that’s extremely strong and willing to work hard.”
The Pioneer School Committee has been talking about closing Warwick Community School since spring, when the district found it had a financial deficit now known to be worth about $450,000. The School Committee and district administrators agree that the deficit is the result of a business model that had become unsustainable due to declining enrollment. For some, school closures are an effective, if perhaps unhappy way of economizing.
The Warwick Selectboard has completely opposed the idea of closing Warwick’s school, with members reasoning that the loss of the school would make the town less attractive to young families and would reduce property values.
A proposal to close Warwick Community School was rejected by the School Committee in March. In the same meeting, the committee voted to close Leyden’s Pearl Rhodes Elementary School, the only school in the district smaller than Warwick’s. Some town officials, especially those in Leyden, have said the School Committee was irresponsible not to close both of the district’s smaller schools.
Then in May, the board attempted to reconsider the vote, and the motion to reconsider failed in a vote of 5 to 5. After that second vote, the Warwick Selectboard set up its advisory committee.
“This is an extremely, extremely important task,” Selectboard Chairman Lawrence“Doc” Pruyne said at the time. “I don’t know of anything in the recent past that’s been more important.”
The advisory committee is largely a continuation of the Warwick Education Task Force, a residents-organized school advocacy group that came together last summer when talk of school closures began, but now with official status. The committee has met twice. A third meeting is scheduled for Tuesday at 6:45 p.m. at Town Hall.
The three major options identified by the committee are each being researched by a subcommittee, Holloway said.
■One option is to turn the town of Warwick into its own municipal school system. In that model, Warwick would have direct control of its elementary school. Warwick was a municipal school system before the Pioneer district formed in 1992, Holloway said.
■Another is to convert Warwick Community School into a charter school — likely a Horace Mann school, Holloway said. A Horace Mann school is a legal designation for a charter school that operates within a school district, but that has freedom to operate outside of many of the regulations that normally apply to public schools.
■The third option is to turn the building into a cooperative educational space, likely separate from any school district, Holloway said. In that case, Warwick would have to make other arrangements for educating its children.
■The committee has also talked about making some arrangement with the town of Orange or the Ralph C. Mahar Regional School District. Holloway said this hasn’t been ruled out, but also noted that those towns may be reluctant to absorb a new town, given those schools’ financial problems and the recently announced retirement of Tari Thomas, superintendent of Mahar, Orange and Petersham.
■The last option is to stay with Pioneer. But, Holloway said, residents are unhappy with how Pioneer has dealt with Warwick recently. Most notably, he said, the non-renewal of Principal Elizabeth Musgrave’s contract was seen unfavorably.
“This is the ugliness that’s being played out,” Holloway said. “It’s wildly inappropriate to treat our school this way.”
What Pioneer is offering, if it closes Warwick Community School, is to send Warwick’s elementary school students to Northfield Elementary School instead. This idea is unpopular in Warwick, Holloway said.
“We have this beautiful building in the community,” he said. “There’s no reason we can’t make this work.”
Reach Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 261.