Proposal to close five Buffalo schools would save $3 million
Phasing out of sixth also being considered
Faced with declining enrollment and the growing possibility of state aid cuts, Buffalo school officials have proposed saving $3 million by closing five schools next year and phasing out a sixth.
The cuts would include closing a Montessori school, a middle school at the Buffalo Zoo and a popular school in the city’s Days Park neighborhood.
Also, the district’s Middle Early College High School, which allows students to earn both high school diplomas and associate’s degrees in five years, would be phased out and would not admit new students.
“Buildings present overhead costs,” said Gary M. Crosby, the school district’s chief financial and operations officer. “We can’t afford to have any more schools open than are absolutely necessary.”
The plan would displace about 2,000 students and eliminate 26 staff positions. The Board of Education is scheduled to act on the proposals Nov. 12 after a series of community meetings.
Proposed for closing after this school year are:
• Poplar Academy, 100 Poplar St., which currently enrolls 421 pupils in prekindergarten through fourth grade. The transferred pupils could be accommodated at Harvey Austin School 97, which is less than a mile away, or other schools of their choice.
• Community School 53, 329 Roehrer Ave., which now has 468 pupils in prekindergarten through grade eight. Officials say there are a number of schools in the surrounding area operating under capacity that could accommodate School 53 pupils.
• Montessori School 78, 345 Olympic Ave., a prekindergarten to eighth-grade facility with 375 pupils. Pupils would be moved to Bennett Park Montessori School, where an addition is being built.
•Dr. Charles R. Drew Science Magnet-Zoo Site, 1 N. Meadow Drive. The school’s 167 seventh-and eighth-graders would be moved to its Museum Site, 1 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
• Days Park Bilingual Early Childhood Center, 10 Days Park, which would be merged with Herman Badillo Bilingual Academy. That closing was proposed earlier, but parents protested and were given a two-year reprieve.
In addition, Middle College, which in May held its first graduation, would no longer accept students and would be closed after current freshmen graduate in 2013. It is located in leased space at Main and Swan streets.
District officials also plan to close former School 26, 84 Harrison St., which has housed special-education staff in recent years.
Twenty city schools have been closed since 2003, but 11 of them are temporarily being used to house students displaced by reconstruction projects at their home schools.
More closings are needed because the school system currently has an excess of 3,718 seats and because enrollment— now projected at 34,990 — has fallen dramatically for many years and is expected to continue to decline through at least 2017-18.
In addition, the state’s financial meltdown raises the fears of aid cuts that could have a dramatic impact because Buffalo schools rely on the state for $704 million, or 80 percent of the district’s funding.
The damage done to Wall Street firms and the related tax losses to the state could necessitate as much as $1.75 billion in statewide cuts, State Sen. Dale M. Volker, R-Depew, said earlier this week.
“The biggest fear — the fear of the unknown — is the state budget situation,” Crosby said. “It continues to get worse, and I think it will get worse yet before it gets better.”
Crosby said that he would have proposed the same school closings even before the state budget crisis but that the possibility of state aid cuts makes the cost-cutting measures even more crucial.
“The need to make the tough decisions is greater than it previously was,” he said.
Even if the Board of Education approves all the closings, there would still be 1,517 excess seats in the district, most of them at the high school level.
“We’ve got to get that down,” Crosby said. “It’s too high.”
Various factors make Grover Cleveland and Lafayette the most likely high schools to be closed or used for other purposes, but there are no plans to do that in the near future, Crosby said.
“For the immediate future, they will continue to be used as they are,” he said. “What we have here is a red flag put up by our demographers.”
Crosby attributed declining enrollment to the continuing growth of charter schools and the city’s shrinking population.
