Fri, Nov 20 2009
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Published September 06, 2009 12:28 am - The fog swirls like wisps of pink cotton candy across the Pymatuning Creek valley as the Penn Line Church of Christ parking lot begins to fill shortly before 7 a.m. Frustrated by their school board’s decision to close Pierpont Elementary, Buckeye parents, grandparents make sacrifices to open enroll their students in Pymatuning Valley Local By CARL E. FEATHER - Staff Writer - cfeather@starbeacon.com Star Beacon The fog swirls like wisps of pink cotton candy across the Pymatuning Creek valley as the Penn Line Church of Christ parking lot begins to fill shortly before 7 a.m.
If this were a Sunday, the evangelist would be ecstatic at the parishioners’ dedication. But this is a prosaic Tuesday morning, the kind that is lived, forgotten and repeated in 24 hours, five days a week. The gathering is one of middle- and senior-high school students, their parents, grandparents and neighbors engaged in the task of preserving a way of life while getting an education. It is also a backlash against a school board the parents feel betrayed them and failed to respond to their concerns when it voted last January to close their community elementary school. All of the 30 or so middle and senior high school students who gather at this church parking lot are residents of the Buckeye Local District. So are the 40 or so elementary students who catch the PV bus that pulls into the parking lot around 8:15 a.m. The exodus, representing about 44 percent of Pierpont Elementary’s resident students at the end of the prior school year, is about what the district expected, said Nancy Williams, superintendent of Buckeye Local Schools. Fifty-one of the 92 kindergarten through fifth-grade students from Pierpont attend Kingsville Elementary this year. Numbers for Braden Junior High have not been calculated, but Williams counted nine high-school students from the Pierpont area who withdrew to PV this year. Alex G. Geordan, superintendent of PV, says the district has 70 Buckeye Local students attending under open enrollment, and he estimates “at least 35 of those are new, could be pushing 40.” Open enrollment students are required to find their own transportation to the receiving school, but in the case of PV, arrangements were made for the buses to pick up students at the Penn Line Church on Route 6, which is on the far north edge of Richmond Township and Lakers territory. The first bus is a dedicated run for the open enrollment middle- and senior-high students. The second bus is an existing run that had room for the elementary youngsters. “PV didn’t have to pick up the kids,” says Lynne Millard, an open-enrollment parent. “They bent over backwards to accommodate us.” “PV has been really awesome in picking up all the Pierpont kids here,” says Ruthella Coder, who has twin boys in fifth grade. “I feel this has given us an opportunity to come together as a community.” Indeed, since students went back to class less than two weeks ago, the parking lot has become an ad hoc Pierpont community center. Parents and students huddle in small groups or roll down their windows and talk across the row of vans. Neighbors take turns hauling the youngsters to and from the stop. Julie Higley brings her daughter, Hannah, a fourth-grader, plus three neighbor youngsters for the elementary run. A neighbor brings her son, a ninth-grader, for the middle/senior high bus. To complicate things even further, Higley has a daughter who chose to remain at Edgewood for her junior year. “I do the morning route and one of the other moms does the evening one,” she says of the PV runs. “This community is awesome, everybody works together, cares about each other. Everybody finds a way,” says Coder. The church’s hospitality facilitates this exchange. 
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