The Mansfield City School District Financial Planning and Supervision Commission voted to adopt the initial recovery plan at their joint meeting with the school board Tuesday night. Immediately following, the school board met and voted to close two schools and eliminate a quarter of the the district’s workforce through a reduction in force.
The bulk of the cuts in the recovery plan will take the form of a significant reduction in force. One hundred and forty-eight (148) employees will be eliminated effective next school year. Ninety-five will be certified staff, including five administrators, and 90 teachers. The 53 remaining positions will be eliminated from the classified staff, which includes custodians, secretaries and paraprofessionals.
Two schools will also close. Newman Elementary and West 5th School will close, and the district will no longer offer traditional preschool. Head Start remains intact.
The district will also eliminate two football and two basketball coaching positions while reducing supplemental pay.
While Springmill Learning Center is not slated for closure, all the teaching positions in the building have been eliminated. The school board has yet to formulate a plan for programming in the building next year.
Both the commission and the school board allowed time for public comment at the meetings. Many spoke about their concerns regarding Springmill Learning Center. The school is unique to Mansfield City Schools and has state of the art inquiry based learning experiences in Math and Science that are teacher facilitated.
Margaret Couch has two children at Malabar School and advocated for Springmill Learning Center.
“Our family highly encourages you to keep Springmill Learning Center open. Math and Science are applied learning and [Gets choked up] excuse me here… It’s, it’s so much more engaging, it makes it so much more fun and if they can remember it they’ll use it later on,” she continued, “Springmill is the best resource our teachers have to teach the other side of Math and Science. There’s just some things you can’t teach a child without showing them. You can talk till you’re blue in the face, but until you actually have them doing it, it’s so much harder for them to learn it,” said Couch.
One fourth grader took action by creating a petition. Dylan Nicholson is a fourth grade student at Malabar Intermediate School and he spoke to the commission.
“I am here to ask you please reconsider closing down Springmill Learning Center. I asked students to sign my petition in support of saving Springmill and I got 575 signatures from Malabar fourth, fifth, and sixth graders and Woodland third graders, and even some adults,” said Nicholson.
Isaiah Myers, another Malabar student, is concerned about the students who will miss out on the program at Springmill in the future if the school were to close. “There are so many great teachers that teach a lot of great stuff,” said Myers.
Others spoke to their concerns about the preschool program, outdoor education, as well as school libraries.
Linda Papajcik is a school librarian, “I am passionate; that’s what puts fire in my belly, and helps me do what I do [tears up] with these middle school students. We have middle school students whose parents cannot read. We have students who never have any adult speak to them without shouting or cussing. We have students whose parents and families never sit down and say, ‘lets play a game, lets play cards, look at this and this book.’ You are taking librarians out of this district and it will be on your heads. Every successful district in the nation has librarians working with those students,” said Papajcik.
The commission unanimously passed the recovery plan, but during the school board meeting there were dissenting votes. Cliff Crose voted against the building closures and the reduction in force (RIF), and Chris Elswick voted against the RIF.
After the meeting Crose elaborated on his vote, “I’m not involved; I find out after it’s done. We all as a board should be meeting and going over these things. I wasn’t in any meetings with the board as a whole to discuss this.”
Crose was not aware of any meetings that took place outside of the scheduled board meetings, which would be a violation of Ohio’s “Sunshine Laws” and he was in attendance at the last board meeting as well as the meeting on Tuesday. The commission is a separate entity from the board, and as such meets independent from the school board. Commission meetings are open to the public in accordance with the “Sunshine Laws” and anyone may attend.
Paul Marshall, commission chair, suggested that the district look into a plan for Springmill. “I think everybody agrees we’re gonna keep it open, the question is what is it gonna look like. I just talked to the superintendent and I said, we need to sit down and we need to figure out a plan on how you’re gonna use Springmill, cause I agree with the proponents, it’s a tremendous learning facility,” said Marshall. “I wanna keep that place going somehow; It’s too good a resource not to make use of.”
The recovery plan will go to the state for approval, which is likely. Marshall could only think of one time that a recovery plan was not adopted at the state level.
“It’s a painful process. I promise you that nobody up there, whether they are on the board or on the commission, enjoys seeing people lose their jobs. I’ve been unemployed and frankly, it was the darkest time of my life, so none of us enjoy that,” said Marshall.
“It’s a painful process. I promise you that nobody up there, whether they are on the board or on the commission, enjoys seeing people lose their jobs. I’ve been unemployed and frankly, it was the darkest time of my life, so none of us enjoy that,” said Commission Chair Paul Marshall.
