Send Bridgeport to Coleville?

ESUSD’s proposal, in the face of declining enrollment, meets with resistance.

Eastern Sierra Unified School District Superintendent Don Clark’s proposal to move sixth to eighth graders from Bridgeport Elementary School (BES) to Coleville’s Antelope Elementary School (AES) was met with resistance at a community forum in Bridgeport last week.

Most parents, Clark said, were against the idea (see related Letter to the Editor on p. 4).

The proposal comes at a time when enrollment numbers at BES are dropping precipitously, from 100 students a few years ago to 51 this year, according to Clark.

“The trend is going to be that we continue to decline,” he added. “Within a few years, we’re going to be in the 30s.”

Although students will never be forced to leave BES and enroll at Antelope Elementary School, Clark suggested the idea because of several perceived benefits.

Currently, Clark said, BES has only five girls in grades 5-8, which prohibits extracurricular activities. “We also have several classes with only boys in them,” he said, noting that this limits students socially.

In addition, “Everybody’s in a double-graded configuration, if not triple,” he said. For instance, fifth and sixth grades are paired, as are seventh and eighth grades. Clark said this challenges teachers, who must meet the academic needs of students in different grades within the same class.

But the largest problem Clark sees is that students are paired together for eight to nine years without any variation. “This year, Kindergarten has two kids in it,” he said. “That’s what they’ll have for the next eight to nine years.”

Should sixth to eighth graders from BES join AES, “The classes would still be small, in the 15-20 student range,” he said. “My thought was that it might help meet the social and academic needs of the students.”

AES currently has 126 students, Clark said, although it only has 12 students in sixth grade and 15 in seventh.

Addressing some of the concerns expressed by parents at the community forum, Clark said that staffing would not change if BES students began to attend AES. “We would just have personnel move from here to there,” he said.

As for the potential impact of taking sixth to eighth graders, and their teachers, out of the Bridgeport community, “It may very well hurt the economy,” Clark admitted, “but the concern of the school is for the academics of the students, not the overall economy. That’s the Mono County Board’s concern.”

Bridgeport has been hurting from a combination of factors, not the least of which is the recession.

Clark also noted that jobs have been moving from Bridgeport to Mammoth, and that government workers and highway patrolmen often choose to live out of state.

“It just means we don’t have a lot of kids here,” he said.

With or without a change, Bridgeport students already have to leave the town for schooling once they reach high school, choosing between Lee Vining and Coleville.

“95 percent choose to go to Coleville,” Clark said.

In spite of Clark’s arguments for the benefits of combining BES and AES sixth to eighth grade students, “The overwhelming response was ‘no,’” he said. “I do understand that no one wants their kids to go to school 35 miles away, and I believe very strongly in parent choice. I heard the response, and that’s going to be my recommendation to the School Board.”