CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – When I graduated from the Fairfield School District in Connecticut, I was part of two school closing ceremonies.
When I completed 6th grade, my elementary school was one of four in the district scheduled to be closed. My old school building became the Board of Education’s administration building. One of the other school buildings became a senior center. Two others were sold off to developers for townhouses.
Years later when I graduated from Andrew Warde High School, the school district was consolidating from two high schools and two middle schools to one each.
Fairfield, a very wealthy suburb of New York, had declining enrollment. The conventional thinking was that families with children couldn’t afford to live in Fairfield. The town’s future was more of a retirement community; that only people who had already made their fortune could afford to live there.
But those school enrollment projections, made by the best experts available, turned out to be wrong. No one could have foreseen the tech boom and the stock market rally. Suddenly there were lots of Wall Street-types who didn’t want to raise their children in New York City. They moved to the suburbs. Fairfield’s now-smaller school district, was overcrowded. All of the school buildings that had been mothballed are open again today. Fairfield again has two high schools instead of one.
No one made a mistake, per se. The trends that overtook Fairfield were unknowable until they happened.
I think of my Fairfield Public Schools experience as Wausau begins to close four elementary schools. Enrollment is down. But to think those schools won’t be needed forever is impossible to know.
The decision in Wausau has already been made. It appears to be the correct one. But the irony in Fairfield was that re-opening the closed schools was very expensive. Almost everyone agrees that smaller schools are better for kids. Yet the finances of the school district here are poor, and voters have said ‘no’ to a referendum this year. I always think of school closings as a sad thing. We think, but can’t be certain, that it’s the right decision.
Chris Conley
Comments