While Onteora School District officials say a reconfiguration is a necessary response to steadily declining enrollments, some parents are concerned about the timing of and data behind the possible closure of up to two elementary schools.
Onteora has lost a large number of students within the last two decades. In the 2004-05 school year, the middle/high school had 1139 students. Now, there are 1101 students in the entire district.
“That’s pretty profound,” schools superintendent Victoria McLaren said. “I mean, the total number is also pretty moving for me, that it was 2100 students district-wide and now it’s 1100. But when I arrived in this district, we had more students in this building than we have in the entire district, and we have not changed our footprint at all since then. It’s so compelling in terms of our efficiency, our effectiveness, the burden on the taxpayers, all of it comes into play.
“That’s what we’re struggling with, the fact that it’s not sustainable. But we want to provide the best possible experience for our kids and honor our taxpayers as well.”
The district is basing its options on a 2019 study by Dr. Kevin Baughman that laid out six options: Close Bennett and make Phoenicia and Woodstock k-5; close Bennett and make Phoenicia and Woodstock k-4, then the middle school 5-8; close Phoenicia and Woodstock and make Bennett k-5; close Phoenicia and Woodstock and make Bennett k-4, and the middle school 5-8; close Phoenicia or Woodstock.
The sixth option would be to do nothing.
The school board recently decided to move the sixth grade to the middle school beginning with the 2024 school year.
What’s your agenda?
A group of parents called the Onteora Parents Engaged Now (OPEN) say the board and administration want to ram though a decision affecting the future of area children while providing no cost estimates for changes to the buildings that would be needed in the chosen configuration..
“Instead of having really in-depth open community conversations with all of the information, they seem like they’re barreling ahead with wanting to choose an option without even knowing what it’s going to cost,” said OPEN member and former longtime school board member Laurie Osmond. “What’s the rush and if you’re trying to force a decision through without having all the information and without having all the input then it really begs the question what’s your agenda, because the board is elected to be representative of the community and it seems like they’re really trying to push to act autonomously.”
Osmond criticized a recent online community forum for its lack of a back-and forth exchange of ideas. “The chat was disabled, no one could interact,” she said. “It was like a lecture, and then questions were read aloud and answered with very, very skewed answers.”
School board president Emily Sherry, who outlined the decision-making time line, noted the many opportunities for public input. “We had a set of three World Cafes, and we just had our third one last night [March 27]. So we are compiling all the data for that. We finished the community survey, and we have all of the responses from that,” she said.
At the community forum on Zoom last week, McLaren presented historical information and other current data.
The World Cafe meetings were set up with representatives from the various communities in the district.
“So we sent out a postcard to every mailbox in the district, and shared it on social media and our website, inviting people to let us know that they were interested in participating in the World Cafes,” Sherry explained. “And then we had a list of about 62 people who volunteered, and we tried to set it up in the right structure so that we would have small table groups. And we went with seven groups of five. And we tried to structure each table so that it had a diverse representation. So there might be a faculty member, a parent, someone from the community, a retiree, or a normal community member.
“We had a few representatives from town government. Business owners and each town government. Victoria [McLaren] reached out directly to each town government to make sure that they really understood that they were welcome to participate. So she actually reached out to each supervisor in the district to make sure that they knew that they were welcome to participate and encouraged to participate.”
Bennett Ratcliff represented Woodstock government. Olive town supervisor Jim Sofranco also participated.
The recitation didn’t win Osmond over.
“What’s the agenda? What’s the rush? And why aren’t you getting all the information out there… And when people are coming to you and saying, ‘We have questions. We need more information,’ Why aren’t you providing it? Why aren’t you providing it in an open and transparent way that’s not skewed toward what seems like a foregone conclusion on your part,” she asked of the board.
While the district survey garnered some 400 responses, OPEN organizer Megan Brenner noted that the parent group petition has 700 signatures.
“And we’ve hardly had this out there a month and I’m sharing this with you because it feels like a lot of their efforts that they’re poorly thought through. They’re not thinking about it in a very well thought-out manner, and they’re not really putting any significant weight .. to include everyone, to get the entire picture of the district, and what it currently looks like today with future incoming students, not just current and graduating,” Brenner said. “It feels perfunctory, like they’re doing what they need to do to say, ‘Oh, we got community input.’ But it doesn’t feel like that’s being actually really taken in and applied.”
Osmond agreed with Brenner. “They can say they checked the box,” she said.
A population debate
Osmond questioned whether the district had taken into account the families who have moved to the area during the Covid pandemic. “I know one of the pre-schools here has a 75-person waiting list,” Osmond said.
Lilly Slezak, another parent, said she didn’t understand why the first step wasn’t to figure out “what the enrollment’s going to really actually look like for the next few years.”
Osmond remained suspicious. “The process just seems so flawed. I don’t know why it isn’t better. That’s where I begin to wonder what sort of an agenda there is,” she said.
The board and administration deny any foregone conclusion other than that something needed to be done. McLaren said pre-school and day-care enrollment had been taken into account.
“We are actually reaching out to every day care and pre-school that typically sends us kindergarten students,” McLaren said. “Many of them are not within the bounds of our district but our families for whatever reason — be it where they work or you know where they tend to frequent — they have students our future students in day cares.”
Sherry and the administrators said that at least so far the influx of people has not translated to an increase in school enrollment.
“There’s kind of an assumption that because we’ve seen an increase in people coming into the community, that there wasn’t also an exodus of people leaving the community. And it’s hard for me to think that that’s true,” Sherry said. “They bought homes that were occupied by other people, and sometimes those were homes that were occupied by renters or families that had children in the district.”
She noted that the process of gentrification displaces lower-income families which may have had more children.
A similar anecdotal misconception happened during the reconfiguration in 2012-13, when Woodstock and Phoenicia were changed to k-3 and Bennett became a 4-6 school, McLaren recalled. “There was also an assertion that I saw that said there was a mass exodus of families and students to private and parochial placements. And when I went back and looked at the data, it literally changed by one the year of the reconfiguration and an additional one the year after. But in those two years, we actually gained back — I think it was like nine students from home schooling came back into the district after we reconfigured.”
Monica LaClair, assistant superintendent for business, said the post-pandemic migration has not translated to an increase in enrollment.
Numbers man weighs in
Jason Glaser, a parent and epidemiologist who runs numbers for government projects with agencies like the Department of Labor, said the process was flawed and the public was not informed.
“What I found interesting about all this is that if you weren’t deeply involved with the school board, being that a lot of us have kids under five, you never would have heard about this. This is all an accident,” Glaser said.
He said that most of the recent families moved here because of the attractiveness of having their children be able to walk to school. If they close the Woodstock School, people will move away, making the enrollment even lower, he argued.
“The irony of it is, if they close this school, I’m not going to be the only one who’s going to be like, I’m just going to go back to D.C.,” he said. “I really want to make it work up here, but what’s what’s the point? I have to send my kid on a bus 45 minutes each way. That’s the average they gave. Forty-five minutes each way for a kindergartner?”
Glaser challenged the data the district was using. “As an epidemiologist, the sampling is crazy,” he said. If I want a good population sample, I build a frame. You’d have different sources of figuring out how many kids are under five. You would do the preschools, you’d look at new home sales, you could work with realtors to do that.”
The district sampling frame was an underestimate. “It doesn’t jive with the demographic increase at all that we’ve seen since 2019,” he said. “So you get a good sampling frame, then you have to have a good random sample to make sure it’s representative. Right now, they’re relying on a volunteer survey, which was missing a lot of key questions. The other problem with the survey was you could just completely douse it. You and I could write four different emails to answer whatever way we thought we could weight it.”
Uncertain upgrades
McLaren said the district was waiting for some rough numbers for each of the scenarios. “But it really is going to be driven by once we decide on the structure that we’re gonna have, what do we want to do? And how state-of-the-art do we want to make our buildings?” she asked. “And each building, each elementary building, right now has a different capacity. So, Phoenicia only has 14 classrooms, Woodstock has 20, and Bennett has 22. So if we were going to close one elementary building, if Phoenicia was going to remain active, we would likely need to add on to that building to have a k-5 population. Because if you have two sections of each, that’s twelve classrooms.”
McLaren thought that part of the problem was that people were like, Well, what are we doing with the buildings? We don’t know what the plan is. So do we put money in something?
“It’s almost like your house,” explained Monica LaClair. “If you don’t know if you’re going to keep your house, are you going to put a lot of extra money into it? Or are you just going to put enough money to keep it upright? So we have focused more on the high school, which is great, but at some point our elementary schools, whichever ones we keep, whatever capacity, do need to be upgraded.”
Glaser remained perplexed by the lack of those budget figures.
“This whole idea of them saying, We’ll make the budget once we make our decision, my head exploded. If I said that to a grant officer at State Department or DOL, they would just be like, please leave and never come back.”
No rush to decision
Sherry said the board will not rush. “We are going to take as much time as we absolutely need to make the best decision that we can. And no matter what, it won’t be an easy decision, and it won’t be quick, but it’ll be thoughtful and it’ll be well planned out,” said Sherry.
Sherry dispelled the idea the board was going to vote on a plan on April 18. “It was not something that the entire board had decided on,” Sherry said, “and we have to move as a group. So everyone has to be in agreement in order for us to vote. So the 18th is not a vote.”
The ad-hoc restructuring committee will present its findings to the board on April 11. District consultant Bill Christiansen will be at the board meeting on April 18.
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