Photo by Flickr user Roger Karlsson. Published under Creative Commons license.
It's a familiar story in rural upstate New York: A small-town school, once bustling and full of life, is slowly being drained of its students, forcing a community to make heartbreaking decisions about closing buildings and merging districts.
Some area towns, like Shandaken, Hurley and Woodstock in the Onteora school district, are currently wrestling with these kinds of decisions. Others, like Rosendale in the Rondout Valley district, have recently lost a school, and now face the fallout from the loss of a vital town institution. Some, like Sidney, lost a school years ago, and are now working to inject fresh life and purpose into an empty building.
Over the last few weeks, the Sullivan County Democrat, a small newspaper based in Callicoon, has been running a series on the problem of falling enrollment, and how local school districts are responding.
In this week's story, reporter Dan Hust writes that Sullivan West has a radical idea for dealing with falling enrollment: Import foreign exchange students into the district.
“With the unanimous endorsement of the board, I’ve begun the process of obtaining approval from the U.S. State Department to allow us to recruit international students who will enroll as tuition-paying students in our high school,” [superintendent Ken Hilton] wrote in a recent district bulletin.
“... These kids come from affluent families who are happy to pay tuition to the school district and room and board costs to district families, knowing that this experience will open up new opportunities for their children.”
Meanwhile, the Democrat reported last week, the Livingston Manor and Roscoe districts are considering mergers, but have made little progress because of backlash from residents:
The two districts have on and off discussed consolidations both big and small in past years, including merging, but have only gotten as far as sharing some staff and sports teams.
A push by Manor to begin a full-fledged merger study this year was shot down by Roscoe’s board late last year, and a recent community forum reinforced a survey that illustrated Roscoe residents’ concerns about a loss of control, identity and stable finances.
“It’s a controversial topic,” admits [Roscoe superintendent John] Evans. “And it seems like there are very few people in the middle.”
A school in Narrowsburg that has been closed since 2005 is attracting interest from several groups, at least one of which wants to transform it into a community center:
[Narrowburg farmer Kevin] Vertrees said members of his group – which was born out of a supper club that meets regularly on his property – have preliminarily discussed their plans for a “multi-use facility” with Bethel Woods, the Center for Discovery and several unidentified universities.
“In general, the feedback has been very positive,” he said.
That includes a survey he conducted of around 90 Narrowsburg-area residents, visitors and businesspeople, who indicated they wanted space not just for the community, artisans and craftspeople but also something that would create jobs.
Reviving a shuttered school as a community center can be done, as Sidney Center's Greater Maywood Rural Community Services group is proving. But it isn't easy, and it isn't cheap.
Woodstock Times editor Brian Hollander wrote recently about the glut of abandoned schools, public buildings and industrial plants in the region. Here's an excerpt from his editorial, "The empty building blues":
Many sit on what once would have been considered primo pieces of real estate…look at West Hurley, or Zena Elementary, complete with their ball fields…once upon a time they might have been snapped up for housing, growth possibilities, industrial uses. Now they could be empty. They have, or could have, unused gymnasiums, offices, theatrical facilities, communications systems. They have been anchors for last century communities, and each costs more to remove now, in the millions, than they are worth. Good ideas that ordinary people have for them are so prohibitive in expense as to be rendered impossible.
