Brian Hagberg
RUSSELL, Pa. – A number of community members questioned whether the Warren County School District was moving too fast when it adopted a reconfiguration timeline in January.
Following the first public engagement session, it appears the school board agrees.
Jacqui Catrabone of Strategy Solutions, the consulting firm guiding the district through the Master Facilities Planning process, told a group of elected officials, business owners, and community leaders during Friday afternoon’s Community Engagement Session that “no final decisions will be made in April.”
Catrabone’s statement came in response to a number of people raising concerns that, according to the timeline approved on Jan. 27, the district wouldn’t have enough time to fully evaluate the data for reconfiguration options in a month’s time.
WCSD Superintendent Amy Stewart clarified to Your Daily Local following the session that modification to the timeline was “already in the queue” to be discussed during Monday’s committee meetings.
“So what you heard at the last public engagement session was the board hit pause,” Stewart said. “And because of that pause, it’s going to have an impact on the timeline. They (the board) have to be together as a board to make that decision. I can’t make that decision, sitting in isolation, the board needs to come to a consensus on what they want that to be. And that was already in the queue to be talked about on Monday.”
Stewart also clarified that the options list the board came away with following its last meeting will be further refined. One of those options, creating autonomous boards for each attendance area, has since been stricken from the list after the district’s solicitor determined “The School Code does not give a Board of School Directors of a school district the authority to create autonomous schools with separate, elected Boards of Directors within the school district.”
That leaves the district with six options currently on the table:
- Move all 9-12 students at Sheffield to Warren
- Split Youngsville 9-12 students between Eisenhower and Warren
- Create a K-12 school in Youngsville
- Move all 9-12 students at Sheffield to Warren AND move all 9-12 students at Eisenhower to Youngsville
- Make no changes to the current configuration
- Adjust attendance area boundaries to redistribute students in a more equitable manner
“That’s the second thing we need to talk about other than the timeline is the option that has Sheffield combined with Youngsville and Eisenhower,” Stewart said. “It’s a two-faceted option, which doesn’t make sense. Everything else is just a single move in that regard. So you’re gonna see that become more clear and have it be a single action.”
Once the options are refined, the district will send out a survey to see which option(s) people prefer.
