{"id":2849,"date":"2012-10-24T09:55:07","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T13:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/?p=2849"},"modified":"2012-10-24T09:55:07","modified_gmt":"2012-10-24T13:55:07","slug":"school-board-votes-to-move-caln-students-to-scott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/?p=2849","title":{"rendered":"School board votes to move Caln students to Scott"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moves won’t happen until new North Brandywine Middle School is built<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

By Kyle Carrozza<\/strong>, Staff Writer, The Times<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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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.<\/p><\/div>\n

CALN \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Moving the student body and educational staff as a whole complies with teachers\u2019 wishes to \u201cstay together as a family,\u201d said Palaia.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cScott is the finest wired and equipped [school] that we have in the district,\u201d said CASD Superintendent Richard W. Como.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cDecisions the board has had to face have been affected by budget decreases,\u201d said board president J. Neil Campbell.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to build two new middle schools and one new elementary school; now we\u2019re down to building one school,\u201d agreed board member Laurie Knecht.<\/p>\n

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\u2014and therefore tax dollars\u2014in the district.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Caln]\u2019s just a parking lot of students waiting to get into other charter schools,\u201d said Rose, who indicated that he had been talking to other concerned parents.<\/p>\n

Rose\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a choice that every parent can make\u2014it\u2019s their right,\u201d Como said about parents enrolling their children in charter schools. \u201cLook at this decision as a community. I want parents to go down and look at Scott; it\u2019s a beautiful building that parents wouldn\u2019t want to take kids out of.\u201d<\/p>\n

This decision comes after the operations committee\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing can happen until new facilities are established,\u201d said Palaia.<\/p>\n

The board said that a slideshow presentation detailing the plan will be available on the district\u2019s website on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moves won’t happen until new North Brandywine Middle School is built By Kyle Carrozza, Staff Writer, The Times CALN \u2013 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2851,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[166,51,164,29,1021,1020],"class_list":["post-2849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-featured","tag-board-of-education","tag-budget","tag-caln-elementary-school","tag-coatesville-area-school-district","tag-school-closing","tag-scott-middle-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coatesvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}