The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Schools propose grade reconfiguration
The district is proposing a strategy that would restructure grade levels across the entire district.
The Chardon School District is proposing a reconfiguration strategy that would close one elementary school, repurpose another and restructure grade levels across the entire district.
It’s all part of its master plan introduced late in 2015 to address the district’s ever-changing economics, needs and responsibilities, school officials report.
According to a Feb. 12 overview of the reconfiguration proposal released by Chardon Schools Superintendent Michael Hanlon, Hambden Elementary School would close. Maple Elementary School would be repurposed and grade levels in all the district’s schools would be reconfigured as follows:
• Munson Elementary School — kindergarten through third grade
• Park Elementary School — kindergarten through third grade
• Maple Elementary School would be repurposed for a pre-kindergarten program
• Chardon Middle School — fourth through seventh grades
• Chardon High School — eighth through 12th grades.
In a November 2015 News-Herald article about the plan — Vision 2020 — Hanlon explained that it involves five specific areas, or vision statements: curriculum and instruction; safety and security; resources; facilities; and communications, all of which were to be investigated over five
years.
Task force members took into account a 10-year projection, produced by Manhattan-based FutureThink, which showed an estimated 300 fewer students — about 10 percent of the district’s enrollment — will attend Chardon Schools over the next 10 years, attributed in part to a decline in kindergarten enrollment.
Last spring the district
began moving forward with the facilities phase, forming a task force to dissect its projected needs and how to best fulfill them, including whether it was feasible to repair some of Chardon Schools’ aging and ailing structures.
A slide presentation Hanlon made during a May Chardon City Council meeting points out that this is not an uncommon phenomenon
around Ohio school districts, but it does play into how much state funding the district receives and, therefore, how much it will need to raise the roughly $75 million needed to build two new facilities the district was considering at the time: a new prekindergarten to sixth-grade school and a combined junior/senior high school.
Since then, things have
changed in the district in light of voters rejecting a 3.9-mill additional continuing operating levy in November But, as stated above, reconfiguration and restructuring have been on the table since 2015, regardless of the levy’s outcome.
“This is not a new effort that has come up as a result of the failure of Issue 26 in November, but, really, something that’s been there
According to a Feb. 12 overview of the reconfiguration proposal released by Chardon Schools Superintendent Michael Hanlon, Hambden Elementary School would close. Maple Elementary School would be repurposed and grade levels in all the district’s schools would be reconfigured...
since 2015,” Hanlon says in a Jan. 16 video posted on GTV’s website.
He continues: “It’s important to understand that the reconfiguration effort is part of the district’s strategic plan, adopted by the board of education in 2015. That plan directed the school district’s administration to study enrollment trends, look at building reconfigurations and if there are ways to be more efficient in the education of our students and more cost effective in terms of that operation.”
According to Hanlon’s Feb. 12 e-mail, the next regular school board meeting is slated for 6:30 p.m. Feb. 20.