To the Editor:
Like many families who have moved to Hopewell Valley, our story is rooted in education — but in our case, it was a medical directive, not a lifestyle choice, that brought us here.
When our son was not yet four and our daughter was still an infant, his specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) looked at us and said words I will never forget: “If I could give you a prescription to move, I would.” We were stunned. Then we understood — she wasn’t offering a figure of speech. She was telling us his development depended on leaving the district we were in.
Her words are still seared in my brain.
Selling our first home — the one with the nursery we had just built, the friends we had just made, the neighborhood we thought we would grow into — was gutting. But we began looking for the one place where that “prescription” could be filled. A friend encouraged us to reach out to Strive PTO, and after a single conversation, we knew where we needed to be: a district where special education wasn’t an afterthought, but built into the community’s self-understanding.
From the beginning, Hopewell Valley met our son with care instead of constraint. At his intake meeting here, fourteen professionals sat at the table to understand him. Not just his file — him. In our previous district, there had been one staff member in the room, and the unspoken message was: “Here is the mold; now fit.” Hopewell Valley did the opposite. It flexed around who our child actually was.
He began in the trailers behind Bear Tavern — in SKIP+, SKIP and PEECH — the same trailers still in use today. He eventually moved on to Toll Gate and now to CHS, where he is thriving as a freshman. As my mother-in-law said recently, he is a poster child for what early intervention makes possible.
But what has always stayed with me is that the excellence of the people has, for years, come despite the limitations of the spaces.
Those trailers — even a decade ago — were cramped and disconnected from the school. Because they were physically apart from the building, students needed escorts for basic movement inside (to reach the nurse, specials, bathrooms, or assemblies), removing opportunities to build independence. At Toll Gate, the lack of an ADA-accessible bathroom in the nurse’s office meant shutting down another bathroom for years just to accommodate care plans. These are not luxuries — they are fundamentals of dignity and belonging.
As our son grew, so did our connection to this community. I eventually served as president of Strive PTO from 2019 to 2023, and during those years I visited every school in the district and met with families from as far away as Florida, who had heard of Hopewell’s reputation in special education and moved here in search of what we had found. That reputation is not hype — I have witnessed again and again how this place wraps around children others had already written off.
But a good reputation needs infrastructure that can keep pace with it.
Which brings me to the referendum.
Q1 is essential. The flooded library at Bear Tavern and the pump failure at Timberlane that sent kids home early were not abstract anecdotes — they were reminders of how aging systems can derail classrooms overnight. Q1 shores up the bones of the schools we already have — the literal safety and upkeep that allow strong programming to happen at all. This question is about fixing critical infrastructure that needs to be repaired and replaced.
But Q2 is personal. It is about finally bringing our youngest learners back into their schools instead of outside them — a fix Hopewell Valley has deferred for more than a decade. It is about giving Toll Gate the ADA-accessible facilities that match the standard of the rest of the district. It is about preschool and kindergarten classrooms designed for children who learn through movement, connection, and play — not narrow, retrofitted trailers that require supervision just to access a hallway.
Voting Yes on Q2 also protects the character of every elementary school in the Valley. When Bear Tavern and Toll Gate cannot house the learners assigned to them, the ripple effect lands on Hopewell Elementary and Stony Brook — swelling class sizes and stretching resources. Q2 is not about expansion for expansion’s sake; it is about keeping schools small enough that they remain what drew so many of us here in the first place. Q2 is primarily about building additions at Bear Tavern at Toll Gate to create schools that are safe and ready to handle our growing community.
This Valley opened the door for my son. It met him where he was and helped him become who he is now becoming. I want that same future for the families arriving behind us — the ones still searching for the place where someone says, “We see your child,” and means it.
I am grateful every day that Hopewell was waiting for us when we needed it. Now we have the opportunity to make sure the doors remain open just as wide for the next child who comes through them.
That is why I am voting Yes on Q1 and Yes on Q2, and why I hope others will too.
With much gratitude,
Brian Cavanaugh
Hopewell Twp. resident
wearehopewellvalley.org
