District eyes busing to ease crowding

By: Stephanie Prokop
   CHESTERFIELD — The Board of Education unanimously approved the superintendent’s recommendation Tuesday to send some students to the Clarence B. Lamb School in North Hanover next year due to lack of space in the current elementary school building.
   Referendums asking voters to approve a second elementary school building in the district were defeated previously in 2003 and 2005. If the referendum expected to go before voters this December is defeated, the board said that more classroom space would be needed for the 2007-08 school year.
   Superintendent Constance Bauer said she is still meeting with North Hanover district officials to look into what grades specifically would be sent, although the school does have the capacity for two grades of students, ranging from first through fourth grade. Chesterfield is a K-6 district.
   The decision was one of three options that the board discussed at a meeting on Feb. 12 which about 40 parents and community members attended.
   Dr. Bauer said at the time that the township could continue to acquire toilet-equipped trailers, it could look into leasing classroom and office space from local districts, (such as Northern Burlington, where sixth-grade students would be transitioning to the following year for seventh grade), or it could pay tuition to North Hanover’s C.B. Lamb school to educate Chesterfield students.
   "It is a concern of mine that students would be socially and emotionally isolated if sent to Northern Burlington, since we can’t guarantee that the classrooms and other space needed would be next to one another," said Dr. Bauer.
   She told the board and the audience at Tuesday night’s meeting that resources like the library and the computer work stations would be compromised if trailers were brought in.
   The nurse and the library instruction programs would likely be shared by the students of C.B. Lamb school and also by the incoming Chesterfield students.
   The cost of busing students to the C.B. Lamb school would be approximately $165,000, and that would include some one-time costs such as hooking up the computer system setup, said school board President Craig Thier.
   That would include six classrooms that would be grouped together in the school and an additional classroom that would be used for special services, such as speech, and foreign language classes.
   Mr. Thier said Richard Carson, superintendent for the North Hanover School District, had expressed interest in having an open house which would welcome parents to the school to see the environment in which their children would be taught.
   One resident, Nick Modelli, asked the board to look at what the students may be missing out on with them being transported the five miles from Chesterfield to North Hanover.
   Dr. Bauer acknowledged the fact that students may indeed lose that familiarity of seeing teachers that they may have known for a few years, but the new arrangement would have teachers and educational professionals constantly available to ease the transition.
   Dr. Bauer said that she expects the Chesterfield Elementary School enrollment to drop to about 300 students, which would ease the pressure on the already filled-to–capacity school.
   Other parents raised questions about whether or not specific programs within the elementary school would go back to normal, such as the entire library space being free again and art class being held in a specific room, verses the teacher wheeling it in on a cart.
   "Specific things require a lot of the expertise of (our) educational staff," she said. "We will be meeting with administration from C.B. Lamb school next week to move forward with this recommendation," she added.