Reconfiguration plan gets skeptical response
Several members of the Uniontown Area School Board said Monday they’re skeptical of plans to reconfigure the district’s city schools. Last week, Superintendent Dr. Charles Machesky proposed sending city students from first to fifth grade to the Ben Franklin School and city students from sixth to eight grade to the Lafayette School Both now operate as first-to-eighth-grade schools. The city’s kindergarten students would continue to attend the Iowa Street Kindergarten Center.
Machesky withdrew the plan Monday calling it premature for this year. He said other measures could be tried first before considering the enrollment switch.
Machesky added that it will give four new incoming board members a chance to digest the study at Lafayette School before jumping into something like reconfiguration.
A similar change was tried back in the 1997-1998 school year but was stopped the following year when directors opposed to the change were voted into office. Back then, the Lafayette School was made into an elementary school for students from kindergarten through fifth grade and the Ben Franklin School was turned into a middle school for students from the sixth through eighth grade.
Among those opposed to the change, then called realignment, were Harry “Dutch’ Kaufman, William Rittenhouse Jr. and Dorothy Grahek. Still on the board now, they all voiced concerns over plans to switch enrollment.
Kaufman said he does not know enough about the plan to comment, but before such an option is utilized, programs already put in place to meet urgent needs at Lafayette School should be exhausted.
In place at Lafayette last year was the MP3 program, a University of Pittsburgh initiative with the objective to increase student achievement levels in reading and language arts.
The project produced grim figures, showing a majority of Lafayette students were reading below or way below their grade level. The project will be a part of the curriculum at Menallen and Ben Franklin schools this school year.
Another student improvement tactic being talked about is having Young Inspirations, a nonprofit group offering after-school help and recreation to Uniontown students and work in the classroom with Lafayette School children, said Kaufman.
“I don’t think we finished looking at the results to see what positive effects they had,” he said. “We need to look at these other efforts of educational remediation before we look at something else at this time.”
“There are too many outstanding issues and they are not issues that can be addressed in a quick period of time,” Rittenhouse said. “With the facts I have, I’m not convinced combining the schools is going to solve anything.”
Rittenhouse said he was against realignment in the past because the taxpayers did not want the change.
“I went through it once, and it didn’t work,” Grahek said. “If this is what we are proposing, perhaps we should have been working on getting a middle school up and running first.”
Grahek was referring to the board’s plan to use the 1910-11 section of the high school as a middle school for students from Lafayette, Ben Franklin, Menallen and Franklin schools. It would have been part of the overall high school renovation project, which has been met with much opposition by residents in the district.
A middle school versus today’s two city middle schools – one at Lafayette, another at Ben Franklin – would let the students feel they had ownership in the school, Grahek said.
“I certainly don’t have the answers, but bringing the children together in a central location and not busing them to one side of town or another would give kids ownership of the school and eliminate some problems with busing,” Grahek said.
She said problems at Lafayette School, though not there exclusively, do need addressed.
“We need parents involved and more experienced administrators,” said Grahek. “I personally liked to see an administrator consistent with discipline.”
School board President Susan Clay said the plan for reconfiguration would be a start to changing Lafayette School for the better.
A board member who agreed with realigning the city schools a decade ago, Clay said she still favors realignment today, though she stressed the public needs to be involved in the process. She encouraged the public to attend today’s meeting of the education committee.
“We have to make a change instead of leaving things exactly as they are,” said Clay. “This is a start to looking a what our options are.”
Clay and Grahek said they will attend the meeting, while Rittenhouse said he should be in attendance. Kaufman said he will not attend the meeting because of personal reasons, but he will receive feedback from the board secretary on what occurred.