District uses Facebook to broaden discussion
POTTSTOWN >> Attendance at the two town hall meetings held so far about converting the former Edgewood Elementary School into a kindergarten center has been sparse.
But that doesn’t mean people are not interested. They’re just not attending in person.
As of Tuesday, the live video streamed and now posted on
Facebook of the first meeting on Oct. 24 at Rupert Elementary School had more than 500 views.
And a similar video shot at Monday’s meeting at Barth Elementary School, which no one but a school board member and reported attended, had more than 250 views.
It’s important to note that “views” does not mean a person watched the entire presentation, but it would certainly be hard to argue that the community is unaware of the discussion.
Although the Pottstown School Board meetings, and other school events, have been live-streamed on the district’s Facebook page for more than a year, the board engaged in a dialog that lasted almost that long about whether to do the same for board committee meetings, which are traditionally thinly attended.
It finally voted last month to begin doing so. Even those meetings are seeing views in
the hundreds, with one facilities and finance meeting garnering nearly 1,000 views.
The final presentation on converting Edgewood will be held Friday, Nov. 8, at 9 a.m. at the administration building on Beech Street. It too will be live-streamed on the district’s Facebook page and the video will be archived there.
At Monday’s meeting, Pottstown Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez indicated, as he has in the past, that this consideration is being driven by the desire to move the fifth grade back out of Pottstown Middle School, where they have been housed since 2015.
The cost to renovate the building, some of which will have to be undertaken whether the kindergarten center plan moves forward or not, hovers between $3 million to $6 million, not to mention some of the costs of busing.
On the downside, having kids go from pre-kindergarten programs, only half of which are in elementary buildings, to a kindergarten center, and then back to elementary schools is a lot of transitions which, educators know, can slow academic progress, particularly among the younger grades.
On the upside, kindergarten centers are fairly common, would allow for more flexibility and, of course, create the space to move the fifth-graders back into the elementary schools, which is how we got here in the first place.
The district has looked at other place that have fifth grade in their middle school, such as Reading, but he said once you start getting down into the details or program and community expectations, the comparisons start to lose their value.
“People in Pottstown have very high expectations,” Rodriguez said.
“There is a feeling of chagrin, I think, about the decision to move the fifth grade into the middle school. I think a lot of people think it was a big mistake,” he said.
That said, Rodriguez said this discussion about Edgewood does not mean the district has made a final decision to move the fifth grade out of the middle school, only that it is looking at options.
One of those options is, of course, keeping things as they are now.
Currently, the district has added staff, including teachers, a security guard, several mentorship programs and mental health counselors through a partnership with Creative Health to try to improve behavior problems at the middle school.
The district has also focused most of its grantmaking on the middle school, securing $2 million in grants for after-school programming — academic, extra-curricular and career exploration — to point middle-schoolers in positive directions.
But Rodriguez said he does not expect any overnight miracles, such as a sudden jump in academic scores, and so far, the behavior statistics have yet to show any major improvements at the school building.
And, he said, the district could go through the steps and move the fifth grade out of the middle school and still find all the same academic and behavior problems at the school remain.
Should the school board decide to move forward with either turning Edgewood into a kindergarten center or a fifth-grade center, as was discussed last year, a decision would have to be made no later than March, said Rodriguez.
That would give the district the 2020/2021 school year to get construction done at Edgewood and it would open as a school again in August of 2021 for the 202½022 school year.
“There is a feeling of chagrin, I think, about the decision to move the fifth grade into the middle school. I think a lot of people think it was a big mistake.” — Stephen Rodriguez, Pottstown Schools superintendent