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Date: 3/2/2017
WILBRAHAM – The Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District (HWRSD) will no longer lease Memorial Elementary School from the town of Wilbraham after the School Committee voted unanimously at its Feb. 28 meeting to terminate its lease with the community.
Cathedral High School leased Memorial School after the June 2011 tornado made the Springfield Catholic high school unusable. The Springfield Diocese paid the town of Wilbraham more than $360,000 per year to lease the building from the town, but Cathedral has since merged with Holyoke Catholic High School and relocated to the Holyoke Catholic in Chicopee.
“The School Committee has determined that it no longer needs the Memorial School facility for the education of district students,” School Committee member Pat Gordon said. “We see no reason to continue to lease the building from the town of Wilbraham. Furthermore, we request that such termination of the lease of Memorial School be memorialized by the party subject to the review by counsel.”
School Committee member William Bontempi said he understands Memorial School is cherished in the community and wishes the building could remain a school.
“But at the same time understanding the district’s challenges in regards to declining enrollment [I] understood that the idea of continuing to lease a building that we simply have no use for, at least in the near future, didn’t make any sense,” he added.
Bontempi said the town has the option to maintain the school or utilize it for a renovation project such as for a new senior center or Town Hall. One of the advantages of the school as a town building would be as a voting area.
“I think one of the things that we walked out of there with is while it’s not something that would be useful for the school district in the short term I think if people maybe want to take a step back and take a look from 50,000 feet … It may not be a bad idea. You could have a kitchen available. You could have a senior facility there. I don’t know whether or not that’s something seniors would even go for, but the idea of having a shared facility with town officials certainly is something that would bare a little more research,” he added.
School Committee member Sean Kennedy said it would cost the district an “astronomical” amount of money to renovate the school for use by the district.
“And the classrooms themselves – there’s not that many more classrooms than there are at other schools that we have,” he explained. “But the classrooms are huge and have really high ceilings … I just think it was a school that was great 50 years ago. It’s a beautiful building and it has a use for the town.”
In other business, Superintendent of Schools Albert Ganem Jr. presented an update on middle school transfer requests. He stated 48 letters have been sent out to parents of students planning to transfer from Thornton W. Burgess Middle School (TWB) to Wilbraham Middle School (WMS) at the start of the 2017-2018 school year.
Although a proposed unified middle school at WMS failed overwhelmingly at Hampden’s Town Meeting, the district has allowed for transfer requests, which has sparked some criticism from residents of both communities.
Ganem said the district plans on reviewing staffing levels at both schools to “right-size” the amount of students at each school.
Combined with 50 fifth graders at TWB that are set to be transferred to Green Meadows Elementary School, that total number of students set to be transferred from the school to others in the district amounts to 98, which is 44 percent of TWB’s student population. At the start of the 2017-2018 school year, there would be approximately 107 students at TWB. The student population of WMS is 528 students as of Jan. 17.
HWRSD Director of Curriculum and Instruction Neil Gile said the information regarding staffing levels would be made public in the near future.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us in a really short window of time to really get everything in place and that’s our charge for the next couple weeks,” Ganem said.
Kennedy said the district’s enrollment has dropped by 298 students during the past five years.
“That’s more than the [student] population of Green Meadows or TWB,” he noted.
In October 2001 a total of 3,882 enrolled in district and as of October 2016 that number has dropped by approximately 800 students, Bontempi said.
“Anything we do with a long-range plan is going to involve the [Massachusetts] School Building Authority (MSBA) – whether it’s going to be a renovation or a new building,” he added. “They’re never going to look at us if we can’t figure out what we’re going to do with the middle school students. They just won’t do it. Asking us to put a long-range plan on the table is literally impossible because the plan was to unify the middle schools to bring the student populations together so that the MSBA would work with us to allow that to happen. Without the MSBA, everything is dead in the water … We barely have enough money year to year to keep up with our budget let alone capital improvements.”