Hopewell School Planning Committee Member Presents to Boro Council

At the Boro Council meeting last Thursday, a representative member of the Future Planning Committee presented the official status of the Committee and the anticipated role of the Committee going forward.

The Committee was established earlier this year to evaluate statistics pointing to declining enrollment across Hopewell Valley, and to make recommendations to the Superintendent. MercerMe has covered the progress from the inception HERE.

At the Council meeting, representative Mel Myers summarized the various options originally considered by the Committee. Myers also confirmed that the options taken off the table in terms of recommendations to the Superintendent  include: 1) that they will not recommend closing an elementary school; 2) nor will they recommend a fragmented elementary school system, with one building housing grades K-3 and one housing grades 4-5.

Myers explained that there have been 6 meetings already which were designed to familiarize Committee members with the district as well as the impacting factors. Going forward, at the 6 remaining meetings, Committee members will be broken up into “working groups” to explore the remaining options in more detail including the possibility of moving 5th graders to the middle school or expanding district magnet programs (such as the STEM program).

When is the next public meeting? We don’t know! Do you? Our sources tell us that the public meeting will be on Monday June 16th. A closed meeting is being held tomorrow morning and hopefully  they will set the official date and time for the next public meeting. When the public meeting occurs, as MercerMe previously reported, the demographer will present an updated report illustrating  any changes in trends taking into account the current real estate market and current population.

Stay tuned!

Corrections: 1) Next committee meeting is closed and being held on June 11th; 2) Mercer Me was amiss in stating that the task force was reporting to the Board of Eduation. The Committee was convened by and will report to the Superintendant. For the purposes of gathering the information, it is a distinction without a difference.