Published May 28, 2009 10:02 am - The parents of 67 Buckeye Local Schools students have applied to send their youngsters to Pymatuning Valley Local Schools next year.
PV open-enrollment applications from Buckeye students jump
By CARL E. FEATHER - Staff Writer - cfeather@starbeacon.com Star Beacon
ASHTABULA — The parents of 67 Buckeye Local Schools students have applied to send their youngsters to Pymatuning Valley Local Schools next year.
PV Superintendent Jake Rose said the district has not made a decision on the applications and probably will not do so for at least another week or two. The big issue, says Rose, is how changes in state funding relating to open enrollment will affect PV’s ability to take in students from outside the district. House Bill 1, moving through the senate, will determine that.
“It comes down to seeing how open enrollment is being funded,” said Rose.
There are only 11 Buckeye students attending PV this year under open enrollment, Rose said. Much of the increase in applications is presumed to be from the Pierpont area, which will lose its elementary school at the close of the school year. Rose said it appears the strongest concentration of open-enrollment applicants from Buckeye is in the primary and middle-school grades.
“There were a lot of first- and fourth-graders,” Rose said.
The Buckeye Board voted in January to close Pierpont Elementary as a cost-savings measure and delay the onset of deficit spending. There are 110 resident students at Pierpont. Many Pierpont parents threatened to send their students to a surrounding district rather than have them face bus rides of an hour or more to Kingsville Elementary, which has the capacity to absorb the Pierpont students.
Buckeye Superintendent Nancy Williams said that district had open-enrollment applications for more than 240 students, “a few more than last year.” Letters accepting or rejecting the applications have gone out. She said if there is an exodus of Pierpont students to PV, that could open up additional slots in some Buckeye classrooms for students who were placed on an open-enrollment waiting list.
For now, the Buckeye School District is planning on accommodating three sections of first grade at Kingsville. Williams said initial kindergarten registration numbers did not suggest an exodus at that level.
“It was not exceptionally low — kind of what we expected,” she said, of the registrations.
Jefferson Area Local Schools did not report any new names on the open-enrollment list from Pierpont, and a request for information from Conneaut was not answered Wednesday.
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