Padalino said an important element to the plan was keeping students from each closed together.
“That was one of the things we looked at when we merged Meagher and JFK starting with next year,” Padalino said. “One of the big concerns coming from parents and faculty at Meagher was, ‘You’re going to split us up and send us all over the district, and we’re one community.’ When I looked at that and we were able to merge those two schools, I thought that we could do this in other schools, too.”
According to Padalino, his plan will allow for the district to save around $25 million over the next five years during a period where state aid is expected to at least remain static and the tax cap doesn’t allow for the same kind of wiggle room districts might have had in the past.
The proposal still has to meet with the approval of the Board of Education. Trustees may decide the fate of the general plan sooner than later to allow school officials to figure out the logistics over the next year.
It has some important Board support.
“I think that it’s a plan that we need to adopt and go forward with,” board president James Shaughnessy said. “A lot of the questions can’t be answered until you make that decision, and then you develop solutions to those problems.”
And some skepticism.
“I think now the hope would be that by the time students go back to school in September that they will know where their school will be,” said Maureen Bowers, a trustee on the Board of Education since 2002. But Bowers also said that there were simply too many unanswered questions about how adding the 5th graders to the middle schools would work. “There’s no question that the fiscal climate is driving some of these decisions, but I think in tandem with that climate we are trying hard to make the right academic decisions for our students. The bottom line is we have to educate them and we want to educate them.”
Padalino said he feels that waiting is no longer an option for a district which hasn’t performed any sort of redistricting in a decade.
“I don’t think we have time to be incremental about this right now,” he said. “The time for that was seven or eight years ago. Right now we are faced with a crisis and [must] manage the immediate crisis. I don’t want to be here again. If we do nothing, we’re facing a significant budget gap next year. I understand that people like the neighborhood schools, but we’re not going to be able to provide the quality of education and services we give to kids if we don’t make a change. I think this puts us in a good setting moving forward to stem the tide. It’s a big step in the right direction.”
Join the family! 
