Shaler Area School Board looks for solution to declining enrollment

Several parents attended the Shaler Area School Board meeting on Nov. 15 to address the board about the possible closure of Reserve Primary School.

The conversation comes after the district received the results of a feasibility study that emphasized work that needs to be done in the district. The study was conducted within the last year and looked at district facilities. The study results predicted that the district’s enrollment will drop over the next five years.

With the risk of losing more students, the school board is now looking for a way to consolidate the district to keep it running.

According to Shaler Area superintendent Sean Aiken, there is no set plan just yet. The district plans to look at every option before making a consolidation plan.

“This is a long-range plan,” Aiken said. “It’s a long-range discussion, too. We’re in the process of having conversations about the future sustainability of the school district. No decisions have been made.”

The school board shared the results with the public at the Nov. 8 committee of the whole meeting. One of the consolidation solutions was closing Reserve Primary School and relocating students to one of the three other primary schools in the district. Aiken said that the district has had declining enrollment for the past couple of years. He said that there are approximately 3,770 students enrolled, and the district is still operating seven schools.

“One of the strategies that districts across the state and across the country use when thinking about declining enrollment is consolidation,” Aiken said. “We started thinking about where we could consolidate.”

Aiken said that the board needs time to decide which, if any, schools need to close, what facilities need to stay open, how to combine schools and how those strategies will help in the future. He said that Reserve is “by far” the school with the lowest enrollment in the district: 114 children are currently enrolled there.

“At the end of the day, the focus is creating the right amount of space in the district,” Aiken said. “When you do that, you have to think about long-term sustainability.”

Arlyn Kalinski, a parent of a Reserve Primary student, described Millvale and Reserve as low-to-moderate income (LMI) communities and said that taking the school out of the community would negatively affect everyone involved.

“The optics alone, and the reputational risk the board could face for this closure is concerning,” Kalinski said.

Kelly Toth, a Reserve parent, raised concerns about the change in student transportation to a new primary school. She said that parents have already had trouble this year with transport inconsistencies, and she wouldn’t be able to drive her child to Marzolf Primary due to her work schedule.

Marzolf is the closest of the three other primary schools to Reserve, sitting about 11 minutes away without morning traffic.

“We’re not in any rush,” Aiken said. “I know people want to know. We want to take our time, commit to a demographer study. We want to gather as much information as possible. We really want to identify what the needs are long term.”

In an effort to find other consolidation solutions, the district has decided to work with Texas-based Davis Demographics, which specializes in conducting studies and finding ways to respond to planning challenges and address ongoing demographic changes.

Georgia Leonard, a project manager at Davis Demographics, will work with district officials to conduct a three-month quantitative study to predict the district’s future development. Aiken said that the study may help the district find a solution that lets them avoid closing a school.

Throughout the study, Leonard said that she would be meeting in person and virtually with district staff, local government planning agencies and housing developers, using geographic information systems and planning software to determine results, build a comprehensive report through analyses, maps and other tabular data and host a conversation with the board about the results.

“We’ve got mobility, which is students moving into or out of your district,” Leonard said. “Then you have residential development. Everything kind of comes together. It’s very data-driven specifically to the (Shaler Area) district.”

Leonard will collect data from Reserve, Millvale, Etna and Shaler to conduct the study. The study will require student information, including their home address, student identification number, grade and what school they are enrolled in.

Aiken said that the district’s communication team will make a link for the public to access a summary of the feasibility and, when the time comes, the demographic study results. He added that there is no timeline for when the study will begin or when a decision will be made about Reserve.