BRUNSWICK
The school board’s indecision over how to deal with a student population bubble in the Brunswick school system is creating “madness” for school staff, said School Superintendent Paul Perzanoski on Wednesday.
Frustrations arose as the board was attempting to put into place the framework of a discussion for a future workshop on the topic. Under the district’s current configuration, kindergarten through grade 2 students attend Coffin School. Grades 3-5 attend Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School.
Board member Rich Ellis has proposed changing the district’s configuration to include two kindergarten- Grade 5 schools. Ellis’s motion to consider the new configuration for future discussion passed by a divided board, but not before drawing the ire of the superintendent.
“Frankly, the indecision of the board is causing a very difficult, almost hostile work environment for us,” Perzanoski told the board. “So please, make up your minds and do it soon, because my staff and I have really had about enough. We can’t be running in different directions.”
Perzanoski said that there was already a lot that the district staff was being asked to do.
“We can’t continue to do it, folks,” he told the board. “You’re great people, but you have to come to a decision. You have to stop this madness.”
The catalyst for moving the fifth grade to the junior high is a population bubble at Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School. Opened in 2011 with the intention of educating 600 students, HBS’s population had been expected to top 700 next year.
The board has been discussing and debating possible solutions for months.
In addition to Ellis’s new proposal, the board is exploring having the junior high absorb the fifth grades, hiring additional staff, creating a new Choice School at the site of the former Hawthorne School, and purchasing or leasing additional modular buildings.
Ellis said he made his proposal in order to find a costsaving solution to the population bubble, however, some decried Ellis’s proposal as a step backward.
“I am dismayed that we’re looking at going back and creating two K-5 schools,” said Chairwoman Michele Joyce.
Brunswick resident Marybeth Latti said that the proposal would cause inequity among the schools.
“It is wrong. You will split this community,” Latti said. “You are going backwards.”
The board must make a decision in June in order to implement whichever decision it makes for the 2015- 2016 school year, according to Joyce.
jswinconeck@timesrecord.com
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