School closure appears to be district preference

Olga Brener or SCMS could face the ax, with other schools reconfigured
By: 
Lee Pulaski
City Editor

Administrators laid out their preference to close a school rather than increase class sizes or cut programs in a presentation to the Shawano School Board on March 16.

The Shawano School District is looking at ways to close an anticipated $2 million budget gap in its 2022-23 budget as it sees a continued downward trend in student enrollment. With a forecast that the total student count could dip below 2,000 later this decade, officials are anticipating that maintaining four schools could be pretty much impossible.

“As a district, you’ve got to acknowledge that you’ll have 829 seats as of 2026,” said consultant Sue Peterson, noting that the district would be at 60% capacity by then. “You’ve got a lot of empty spaces. That doesn’t mean those spaces aren’t being used right now in different ways. We want to look at the most efficient way of doing that.”

The decision is still up in the air about which school would close, but administrators have narrowed the list to two — Olga Brener Intermediate School and Shawano Community Middle School. The middle school is the oldest of the four facilities for the district, but it also comes with a fair amount of debt as voters approved a $9.5 million referendum in 2015 that is still being paid off.

With the closing of one of the schools, the remaining three schools would need to be reconfigured. In the first option, third and fourth grades would move to Hillcrest Primary School, and fifth grade would join the middle school grades at either Olga Brener or SCMS. The other option would have third-grade students go to Hillcrest, and Shawano Community High School would take in seventh and eighth grades while the remaining school would house grades 4-6.

Board members seemed against the idea of moving the seventh and eighth grades to SCHS. Board member Chuck Dallas recalled growing up in a school in Green Bay housing grades 7-12 and surmised the older students might be a bad influence on the younger ones.

“The kids that were in seventh and eighth that went to Bay Port before the middle school was built learned how to smoke pot, drink beer and how to fight,” Dallas said. “They didn’t amount to a hill of beans, to be honest with you.”

Board member Mart Grams was also against reconfiguring grade levels with the high school and suggested that the middle school should be shuttered.

“It’s a money pit. It’s our oldest building,” Grams said.

Board member James Davel noted that a lot of parents he has spoken to were nervous about the prospect of moving seventh and eighth grades to the high school.

“We’d have to have very clear messaging to parents on how things were designed in the school,” Davel said.

The school closure was seen as the top preference for administrators, even while parents on social media expressed frustration that the decision is coming so abruptly. Cutting programs would be the administrators’ second choice but they noted it would result in the elimination of at least a dozen employees, nine certified staff and three support staff positions. Increasing class sizes is the least desirable for administrators, as that would mean cutting 15 employees.

Any of the options would see the cutting of positions this year via retirements and resignations that would go unfilled, but even with those cuts, it will not reach the $2 million the district needs to present a balanced budget to the school board in October.

“We will have natural attrition, and this district has a range of natural attrition anywhere between 15 to 30 (employees),” Superintendent Randi Anderson said. “If we’re going to do a non-renew to able to right-size the organization, we have to make that determination and they need to be notified no later than April 30.”

She noted that the district hoped to send non-renewal notices at the beginning of April to give affected employees the opportunity to apply at other districts.

Closing either Olga Brener or SCMS could result in some renovations for the surviving school and possibly SCHS, and depending on which choice the board goes with, it could determine when the district closes a school. If the middle school gets the ax, career and technology education facilities would need to be added to Olga Brener, but administrators announced that there would be less renovation cost if the middle school remained open.

Even if a school is closed to education, it’s likely that school’s gymnasium would remain open, as gym space in the community is at a premium.

“We know that’s used in the community,” Anderson said.

A final recommendation on closing a school is expected to come from the administration in late April. Anderson said it is recommended to make the school closure decision now, as waiting a year would be “kicking the can” and require tapping into the district’s fund balance to make the budget solvent.

“The priority for the administrative team is maintaining programs and maintaining personnel,” Anderson said. “We should make the hard decisions to the best of our ability this year so that we can move forward and have such a severe conversation in the future.”


lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com