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Date: 12/19/2023
WEST SPRINGFIELD — Close Mittineague School and you’re destroying a community, said students, alumni, parents and teachers on Dec. 12.
The Justin Morgan Auditorium at Town Hall was filled to standing room only for the School Committee meeting where the superintendent reported the findings of the Student Population Projection Committee. The committee is recommending moving elementary students out of Mittineague this fall, merging them into the recently built Coburn School. The committee’s long-range proposal is to build a larger new school and eventually close John Ashley, Memorial and Tatham schools, too. The plan also includes the expansion of full-day pre-kindergarten, initially using classrooms at the Mittineague and John Ashley buildings, and eventually integrating those classrooms into Coburn, a renovated Fausey School and the new school.
But Mittineague was the main reason about three dozen people took to the podium to ask the School Committee to ignore, or at least slow down, the recommendation. The Mittineague community is worth preserving, they argued, and it won’t survive being moved to a different building.
“We all know each other,” said fourth-grader Rowen Miles. “We play on the playground together and walk home together. … We are a small family with a big heart. I love my school.”
It’s a community unlike the other four elementary schools in West Springfield, said Destiny Hurd, who attended Memorial School but chose as an adult to buy a house in the Mittineague neighborhood because of the school’s reputation.
“I have fifth grade teachers who know my third-grader,” she said. “They know exactly what her likes are and what her dislikes are. I don’t even know [those teachers] myself. That’s something you don’t get at those other schools. … Never once has it been a concern in my mind that my child is going to be one of the ones who slips through the cracks.”
Susan Girardi, a teacher at Mittineague for the past 36 years, called it “a small neighborhood school with a special kind of magic that people have to see to believe.”
Though many parents acknowledged there are positive aspects to the town’s other schools, including Coburn, they said they would never be able to recapture the small-school feeling at Coburn, which serves the downtown and Merrick neighborhoods.
“They will be going to a school with kids that do not necessarily live close by,” said Lena Bidwell, the mother of two Mittineague students. “They will have a harder time to build close bonds, and close bonds are what makes a community strong.”
Keeping Mittineague open would require renovations estimated at $19 million, according to the committee report. It doesn’t make financial sense to invest that kind of money in an old building, said Superintendent Stefania Raschilla. The Student Population Projection Committee found the total cost of renovating current elementary schools was comparable to the cost of the recommended new-construction option. The difference is that for a new school, more than half the cost would be reimbursed by the state, whereas for renovations, the whole cost would be borne by local taxpayers.
Parents said they’d still like to see Mittineague stay open as long as possible.
“When I talk to my kids about their experience in that school, it’s never the cracks in the floor, or it’s hot in the summertime. It’s the experiences they had,” said Marc Casey, the father of three children who have attended Mittineague and one currently in preschool. “If they continue to go to Mittineague School, my children will make that sacrifice, I’m fine with that sacrifice.”
“I don’t value a new building as much as I value the small community we have,” said Alison Hansen, a mother of three Mittineague students and two alumni. “If we had the best interest of our students at heart, we would not be talking about bright and shiny new buildings, we would be talking about increasing pay for teachers. We’d be talking about class sizes.”
Bidwell said West Springfield could afford Mittineague renovations with the money it will save by not having to put neighborhood children on buses to Coburn. Currently, all Mittineague students live within walking distance of their school.
Mittineague parents also criticized the plan to remove grades 1-5 from the building but then use it temporarily as a kindergarten and pre-kindergarten center. The 152-year-old three-story building is not an ideal home for four-year-olds, they said.
“Walking up those stairs, that is a huge liability to this town, it is an accident waiting to happen,” said Kaitlin Cote, the mother of a two-year-old. “There has to be another solution for pre-K other than putting them in a school that is not designed for those little feet walking up and down those stairs.”
MaKenna Miles, a seventh-grader who attended Mittineague from grades 2 to 5, also questioned how the school can be considered inadequate for elementary pupils but not for early childhood classrooms.
“If you’re moving all the students out … and you’re saying Mittineague is unsafe, why would you put pre-K or kindergarten in there?” she asked.
Although the School Committee had previously discussed calling a special meeting to vote as soon as possible on the Student Population Projection Committee’s plan, committee members said on Dec. 12 that they won’t take action on it until January. The next School Committee meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024.
School Committee member Nancy Farrell, who did not run for reelection and was serving at her final committee meeting, counseled her colleagues not to take a vote until they had “specifics about the plan and the cost,” including the projected class sizes at Coburn School next year, the cost of busing Mittineague students to Coburn, the cost of busing kindergarten and pre-kindergarten pupils to Mittineague, and how class sizes and enrollment boundaries for all the schools will be affected when the proposed changes take effect.
She also said the School Committee needs a strong commitment from Mayor William Reichelt to support the plan financially. Even if the town gets 75% reimbursement from the state, as it did for the Coburn construction project, local taxpayers would still pay more than $20 million of the new school, plus the cost of renovating and expanding Fausey School to make room for kindergarten and pre-kindergarten.
School Committee member Colleen Marcus pointed out that the pre-kindergarten expansion, including the use of Mittineague School, was not part of the Student Population Projection Committee’s plan, but was added later by the superintendent.
Raschilla had explained that having an 1871 building still in use would help the town compete for state reimbursement money. The other schools to be closed — John Ashley, Memorial and Tatham — were all built in the 1950s, as was Fausey.