HAS board members voted to clo... HOLLY, Michigan – Holly School Board members convened in a special meeting Monday night to revisit the March 28 decision to close Sherman Middle School.
On April 4, board members Michael Newcomb and David Rath requested the special meeting, maintaining that members of the public had not been well enough informed on the six-month long housing study, or on Superintendent Kent Barnes' March 14 recommendation to close Sherman Middle School, revert Holly elementary schools back to a K-6 format, and send the district’s seventh and eighth grade students to Karl Richter Campus.
On Monday night, over 100 concerned teachers, parents and students attended the special meeting, many taking the opportunity to share their thoughts with the board.
Public comment lasted for 90 minutes of the 2 hour meeting, while a total of 25 people addressed the board – eight speaking in support of the board’s decision, and 17 asking the board to reconsider, six of whom were Sherman Middle School students themselves.
Among those in support of the board’s March 28 decision was Davisburg Elementary School fifth grade teacher Stephanie Creasey.
“We’re not placing the blame of this financial mess on the right people,” Creasey said. “We should be angry at the people who continually attack public education and keep cutting our funding,” she said, adding that residents should call or write to their state representatives and governor.
“Tell our state representatives and the governor to use the surplus in the K-12 School Aid Fund on K-12 education, not on other things as the governor has proposed.”
Creasey said she supported the board’s decision to close Sherman Middle School because it saves the most money. “I caution everyone, regardless of what side of the issue you’re on to be careful what you wish for, because you just may get it,” she said. “Even closing Sherman Middle School doesn’t come close to balancing our budget, and that means there are other cuts still to come, and those cuts would be even deeper if we didn’t close Sherman.”
HAS parent Wendy Scruggs said she was opposed to the decision to close Sherman Middle School, adding that she felt the housing survey and study was misleading.
“I feel like the housing study survey was misrepresented to the public about what it was for,” she said. “I did fill it out, but was under the impression that I needed to fill it out to save my kid’s music program and to save Holly Elementary.”
Scruggs said she had never been told that Sherman Middle School could potentially be closed. “I feel like the public was lied to about the housing survey study which could result in a lot of the public not taking an interest in the survey which in my opinion would make the survey inaccurate – that’s how I feel.”
Scruggs also added that she is not in favor of extending elementary schools to a K-6 format, maintaining that sixth graders will bring more mature language and dialogue to the elementary school level, something to which she doesn’t want her fourth grade son exposed.
Conversely, Ben Schneider, a former HAS grad and father of six said he supports the board’s decision to close Sherman Middle School.
“I work serving K-12 schools as part of my profession in the construction industry, and one thing that I’ve come to understand since Proposal A is school districts are either growing or they’re dying,” he said. “I think everything that we need to do as best as we possibly can to leverage our resources now needs to support the idea of growth, because everyone knows on a per pupil funding basis, more students we can get back, more enrollment we can get back in this distinct, more teachers we can hire, more programs we can provide for our kids- that’s it,” he added. “It’s that simple.”
Schneider said he sees reduced time on the bus for students as being “huge in the interest of bringing people back to the district," and is supportive of reverting elementary schools back to the K-6 format.
“I don’t think that we have to be too concerned about rushing our sixth graders off to middle school where they will grow up too fast,” he said. “I like the idea of having sixth graders around the elementary school where they can mentor some of the younger students.”
Lisa Nuckolls, a paraprofessional at Sherman Middle School, said she didn’t understand the decision to close Sherman Middle School.
“My problem with the decision that you’ve made is if it was going to save more money to close Holly Elementary, why aren’t you closing that school instead of Sherman?” she asked.
Nuckolls said she believed the district would save approximately $365,000 by closing Holly Elementary School. “I know you’re not saving that much by closing Sherman, not to mention how much its going to cost moving all the technology back to Karl Richter Campus,” she said.
“I know people are upset that you already made the decision and now you’re coming back and looking at it again, but if it’s going to save you $100,000 – how many teacher’s jobs is that? I mean, we’re talking about people here.”
Following public comment, Vice President Sue Julian made a motion to reconsider the March 28 decision to close Sherman Middle School with Newcomb seconding her motion.
Julian told audience members that she made the motion to reconsider out of respect for those who came to share their thoughts on the issue, but reiterating that closing a school will not in any way solve the district’s overall budget deficit.
“This is a small decision compared to the decisions that lie ahead of us,” she said. “However, if we don’t attempt to save any money at this time, I think the whole community has the right to say that the board would be acting irresponsibly – we have to make some decisions to try to save money now.”
President Tony Mayhew took time to address Nuckolls concern about choosing not to close Holly Elementary School. “Closing Holly Elementary School included $200,000 for four teachers,” Mayhew said. “That would mean four teachers would go on lay off right off the top – if we didn’t lay off the teachers, that would reduce the savings to $169,000.”
Mayhew expressed his disappointment with certain stakeholders who implied that they “don’t care about kids at the elementary level because they don’t have elementary school aged kids in the district.”
“We’re all volunteers on the board trying to do what’s best for our kids,” Mayhew said. “Not all of us have kids in the district, and not all of us have elementary school aged kids in the district either, but we are committed to all of our kids out here – we’re not turning our backs on any of them,” he said. “To imply that – well, it’s horrible and disappointing.”
Newcomb would have the final word before taking the vote.
“The sad thing is that we’re closing a school that was functioning correctly – a school that had three grades working with sixth, seventh and eighth grade curriculum in getting the kids ready in a trimester format for high school,” he said, adding that he worries about the decision in the long run.
Michael Newcomb cast the disse...
“We’ve used a lot of bond money to repair the things that were wrong with KRC, but in the years ahead, we’re going to have to fix more things – the gym, the lockers – all that will have to be addressed in the future, and as a taxpayer, I don’t want to pay for it, and I don’t want to have to ask others to pay, either.”
Newcomb finished by saying closing Sherman Middle School is a bad idea, and said that the elementary housing study had been misleading to the public, and not allowed stakeholders to provide their input properly.
In a vote of 6-1, the motion to reconsider the vote on closing Sherman Middle School failed with Newcomb casting the only vote in favor.
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Comments
I have to disagree with you, and anybody who has attended all or most of the meetings, has done any amount of research on their own, and taken part in the survey/focus group thing as you did, should know that it wasn't a "bait and switch" as you call it. It was a concerted effort to figure out what is the best course of action to take for OUR KIDS. This was it. If anyone asks for a recall, I say it be directed towards the two board members who asked for the issue to be revisited. What a colossal waste of time, and HORRIBLE message to send to our kids.
How do you know what research those of us on the other side has done? Do you know what the survey was even titled? I do, because we took part in it, and it didn't have anything to do with this decision that was made. The meeting that was held was an EXCELLENT example for OUR kids to show them exactly how a democracy works! I can't believe anyone saying that this was the best choice for OUR kids, when we just stripped them of a great facility and put them one step backwards. We are supposed to strive to move our kids forward and providing them with any advantage that we can, but we are moving them backwards. Taking sixth grade out of elementaries was a great move, and most of the top districts participate in this. Now our preschoolers and kindergarteners are going to share the same buildings with the sixth graders! Everybody has forgotten the reasons why they were separated in the first place. There is something seriously wrong with this school district, and things must change. Hey, if it will save some more money, why don't we go backwards some more and just go K-12 together? Maybe then we can have iPads and iBooks for everyone! The bottom line is this board should be ashamed of themselves for being fiscally unresponsible and for putting our district in this situation. And anybody who can say that putting OUR kids in a less competitive school and in a building that wasn't good enough in the '90's is the best choice for them should be ashamed also.
The Michigan School Board group did all the data analysis and came back with closing Sherman as the most fiscally responsible thing to do. As a stakeholder and someone who is helping to foot the $14K bill for the study, I’d be more [censored]ed if the board had thrown out the findings and done something completely different than what the experts suggested. Isn’t that why we hired them?
Putting the preschool into a K-6 building makes sense. I think parents who have their preschoolers in a certain building and come to understand the great things our principals and schools do is far less likely to pull their kid out in first grade to send them to Holly Academy or some other school. Having seen first hand how capable our schools are, I can only think this will help put more butts in seats. Moreover, the principals from every singe elementary school supported the K-6 format, noting that sixth graders are good mentors for the younger kids. There was only one board member that said it would be “like repeating fifth grade,” and he’s one of the guys who called for the matter to be reconsidered in the first place.
As for technology, it’s a no brainer .In this day and age, technology has to be on the cutting edge. If our schools aren’t prepared to offer students what they need from a technology standpoint, then we’re going to lose even more students.