POTTSTOWN PA – With additional classrooms becoming available by January (2012) at the newly expanded Ringing Rocks Elementary School, and facing space limitations in other buildings, the Pottsgrove School District Board of School Directors decided Tuesday (Aug. 8, 2011) to begin a study on the publicly touchy matter of redistricting.

The process would set new guidelines and boundaries to determine where children attend school, and by September 2013 might result in moving some students from one school to another or re-configuring which grades are housed at specific buildings.

“District enrollment patterns are changing,” Superintendent Dr. Bradley Landis explained, crowding some classes, and he added Pottsgrove also potentially could save money with concurrent future changes in staff levels under new boundaries or grade realignments.

Directors acknowledged the necessity of redistricting, although it is likely to create significant controversy. “This could be the hottest topic we’ll work on,” board veteran Philip Keogh, who endured a similar effort several years earlier, told his colleagues. “I guarantee you it will mean more than just one member of the public in our audience,” board President Michael Neiffer agreed.

Construction at Ringing Rocks on Kauffman Road in Pottstown PA, which includes several new classrooms, is expected to be substantially completed by mid-September 2011 and is planned to re-open to students after the district’s winter holiday break. Ringing students currently attend classes at the former St. Pius High School building on North Keim Street, leased for that purpose from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

Accommodating first-graders at the Pius building and West Pottsgrove Elementary School, Grosstown Road, Stowe PA, has been a tight fit for the soon-to-arrive start of the 2011-2012 school year, Landis said. Decisions on where this year’s youngsters would learn their lessons delayed issuing first-grade class lists for both schools until Tuesday afternoon; other lists were released a week ago.

Landis doesn’t expect the problem will lessen next year, and suggested the board allow him to form an “elementary attendance boundary committee” consisting of three board members (Keogh, Patricia Grimm, and David Faulkner), teachers and administrators, and parents. The committee can examine “a number of options,” he said. If it starts work within coming months, Neiffer added, “we might have a plan in place that we can communicate to parents by spring.”

Related (to the Pottsgrove Board of School Directors’ meeting of Aug. 9):

• Touchy Pottsgrove Re-Districting Now Being Considered
• Pottsgrove Teacher Named Western Center Principal

Photo from Google Images