Moves won’t happen until new North Brandywine Middle School is built
By Kyle Carrozza, Staff Writer, The Times
The Coatesville Area School District voted to approve eventually moving students and staff at Caln Elementary School to a new elementary school that would be housed in what is now Scott Middle School. Middle school students currently at Scott would move to a new North Brandywine Middle School. No students or staff will move until the new building is built and South Brandywine Middle School is renovated, school officials say.
CALN – The Coatesville Area School Board voted to move Caln Elementary students to Scott Middle School and Scott students to North Brandywine at its meeting on Tuesday night.
Already planning to close the aging Caln Elementary, a committee led by director of elementary and special education Jason Palaia, presented a plan to relocate students and staff and handle the logistics of closing a school and moving two student bodies.
The plan, which Palaia says will not take place for a few years, will transfer all Caln students and teachers to Scott Middle School, while keeping the same boundaries that dictate which elementary school students attend. Scott students will go to North Brandywine, while South Brandywine remains unaffected by the change.
Moving the student body and educational staff as a whole complies with teachers’ wishes to “stay together as a family,” said Palaia.
This plan presented the more cost-efficient and convenient of the two options that the committee presented. Because Caln and Scott are already so close, only one additional bus will be needed while personnel and construction requirements will be minimal, resulting in a predicted cost of $84,177.
“Scott is the finest wired and equipped [school] that we have in the district,” said CASD Superintendent Richard W. Como.
The plan to move students to Scott was selected over a second option that the committee developed, one that would distribute Caln students among other elementary schools and place all of the district’s fifth graders in middle school. However, with the cost of busing, staff, and modular to accommodate these changes, this option would have cost the district over $4 million, they said.
The board acknowledged that neither course of action was optimal; they had originally wanted to build a new elementary school and completely replace both North and South Brandywine, but finances will no longer allow the district to do so.
“Decisions the board has had to face have been affected by budget decreases,” said board president J. Neil Campbell.
“We wanted to build two new middle schools and one new elementary school; now we’re down to building one school,” agreed board member Laurie Knecht.
Not all who attended the meeting were completely happy with the new plan. Vince Rose, a Caln Township Commissioner, who has two children in the district, asked the board to look at the larger picture of their actions, saying that maintaining quality elementary education is important to keep students—and therefore tax dollars—in the district.
“[Caln]’s just a parking lot of students waiting to get into other charter schools,” said Rose, who indicated that he had been talking to other concerned parents.
Rose’s concern stemmed from the fact that when a Coatesville student transfers to a charter school, 80% of the tax money from each student go to that charter school, rather than Coatesville. He also voiced concerns that the district will eventually be in the same position with Scott.
“That’s a choice that every parent can make—it’s their right,” Como said about parents enrolling their children in charter schools. “Look at this decision as a community. I want parents to go down and look at Scott; it’s a beautiful building that parents wouldn’t want to take kids out of.”
This decision comes after the operations committee’s decision earlier this month to rebuild North Brandywine and renovate South Brandywine. Neither the closing of Caln nor the replacement of North will take immediate effect, as Scott Middle School will undergo construction, and North must first be rebuilt entirely.
“Nothing can happen until new facilities are established,” said Palaia.
The board said that a slideshow presentation detailing the plan will be available on the district’s website on Wednesday.
