Closing city school can’t be off limits

We hope the four uncontested candidates for the Board of Education – two incumbents and two newcomers – had an opportunity to celebrate their election to four-year terms after the polls closed Tuesday night.

Because when the newly constituted school board gets sworn into office next year, there won’t be a lot of time for handshakes and backslapping.

Facing what Superintendent Mark Conrad is calling an anticipated “structural deficit” of $4 million entering the next school year, the central administration and the school board will be hard-pressed to come up with anything but unpopular options to compensate for the egregious financial mismanagement of the previous administration during the fiscal year that ended June 30.

And one of those “unpopular options” could very well be closing of one of the city’s 12 elementary schools.

As reported in Sunday’s front-page story by education reporter Michael Brindley (“Closing Argument / With enrollment declining, closing a school isn’t off the table”), the combination of declining elementary school enrollments and the school district’s financial woes have combined to resurrect an issue that has come up several times during the past five years.

The most serious discussion took place back in 2004, when the school board was facing a $5 million cut in its proposed budget for the 2004-05 year to meet a level-funding mandate by then-Mayor Bernie Streeter.

That prompted parents from the city’s three smallest elementary schools – Amherst Street, Mount Pleasant and New Searles – to turn out for a February school budget meeting and implore then-Superintendent Joseph Giuliano and the school board to fight the mayor’s budgetary guidelines.

Three years later, a study of the district’s space needs conducted by the New England School Development Council concluded that “a small school could be discontinued,” though the $27,400 study stopped short of recommending such an action.

And last year, a facilities committee headed by school board member Robert Hallowell – and consisting of school board members, school district staff and aldermen – concluded there was no need to close a school.

But that was before it was learned that the district overspent last year’s budget by $3.36 million and underfunded this year’s budget by an estimated $4 million.

How much of that gap could be made up by closing one of the city’s elementary schools is unclear. Four years ago, then-business manager Conrad told the school board closing a school could yield $900,000 in savings. An estimate a year earlier pegged that number as high as $1.7 million.

No doubt the savings generated by closing a school would depend at least in part on how many of the administrators, teachers and support staff would be eliminated and how many would be needed at the schools that would accept the affected students.

For his part, Conrad made it clear last week that he doesn’t intend to enter next year’s budget preparations with closing a school in mind.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a dead issue. At least two board members – Jack Kelley and Sandra Ziehm – said closing a school is not an option the board can afford to take off the table.

“I absolutely think we need to look at that,” said Ziehm, who was re-elected to a four-year term Tuesday night. “We need to look at everything. Four million dollars is not going to come in thousand-dollar clips.”

Few acts are as disruptive to the fabric of a community as closing a neighborhood school and redistricting the students, so we share the superintendent’s hope that such a drastic action won’t be necessary in the coming year.

But given the pending $4 million shortfall and projections that suggest enrollment will decline to 5,311 students in K-5 by 2016 – if true, a drop of nearly 1,000 students since 2000 – we don’t see how school officials can afford not to at least consider it moving forward.