Following testimony by a half-dozen upper highway residents, the Haines Borough school board voted 5-0 Tuesday to oppose putting up for sale Mosquito Lake School before July 2016, with members saying such a move was premature. The same question will go to the borough’s planning commission Thursday.
“It seems we’re moving awfully fast on this,” said board member Mike Wilson. “It should be given a chance to see what the community can come up with, working with the borough, to develop a solution.”
Board members Anne Marie Palmieri and Brian Clay were absent from the meeting.
Superintendent Ginger Jewell urged advocates for the school to help get responses to an online survey of parents. Jewell wants to know by Feb. 1 how many students are committed to attending next year. The district closed the school last year when enrollment dropped below 10, the number needed to trigger extra funding from the state.
Mosquito Lake parent Aimee Jacobson reported that research by Friends of Mosquito Lake School and Community Center found there are three students who would attend the school next year and seven “maybes,” as well as seven students interested in attending a preschool there, if it were available.
Dana Hallett, a spokesman for the Friends, said his group would have a full demographic report to the district by Feb. 1. He said recruiting students has been made more difficult by the school’s closure last year.
“Parents are concerned because there is a history – perceptions are reality or not – there’s a history that the school district kind of fell down last year and didn’t support the community out there. Parents are understandably a little bit leery. That’s the perception,” Hallett said.
Acting board president Sarah Swinton said she took offense to the statement that the board “didn’t do a very good job” last year regarding the school.
“I think – as a board – we did a very thorough job. We had plenty of meetings. We had lots of input. We waited to the last moment. We tried everything,” Swinton said.
Manager David Sosa said he wants to be able to sell the building this year if the building is not used for a school. Maintaining the empty school costs the borough about $30,000 a year.
Advocates for the school this week also picked up another ally for keeping the facility, former Mayor Stephanie Scott, who last summer supported selling the building.
“I have given the situation a lot of thought and have come to believe that the number of people living in the upper valley justifies a public facility to accommodate their gatherings” regardless of having 10 students for a school, Scott said.
Maintaining the building as a videoconference site for borough assembly meetings or a satellite public library would be a “valid, public expenditure,” Scott said. “The borough has other subcommunities, but they’re not so distant from town.”
Scott said she thought highway parents who pulled their students out of the school last year when a new teacher was hired have learned a valuable lesson.
She compared sale of the school to demolition of the former elementary school gymnasium, that wellness advocates wanted as a town recreation center. Demolition was a mistake, Scott said.