Jul 19, 2017 3 min read

WAYNESBURG – Central Greene School Board is considering a plan to close Margaret Bell Miller Middle School and to move middle school students into the district’s existing elementary and high school.

The school board has been discussing what to do about the aging middle school for several years and for about the past year has focused on a plan to close the school and consolidate classes into existing buildings at the main campus, Superintendent Brian Uplinger said Tuesday following a building and grounds committee meeting.

The board interviewed four architect firms in May to study consolidating classes in the two buildings. A motion to hire a firm introduced last month failed when it did not receive a second.

The building and grounds committee Tuesday discussed various aspects of the plan and asked Uplinger to obtain additional information from the architects and present a detailed recommendation to the board.

“What we want to do is shrink our building footprint as a cost-saving measure,” Uplinger said following the committee meeting.

Renovating the middle school, which was constructed in 1928 and is in poor condition, would cost millions and “would not be fiscally responsible,” Uplinger said. The cost to build a new building, meanwhile, would be “astronomical,” he said.

The decrease in the district’s student population during the last decade may justify consolidating into two buildings. The district has been losing about 30 students a year for about the last 10 years, Uplinger said.

The district now has about 1,800 students, with about 420 in the middle school. Projections from the state Department of Education indicate continuing student population declines not only in Central Greene but in other area school districts, Uplinger said.

Central Greene also has seen a decrease in its tax base. Initial estimates indicate closing the middle school and the district administrative building and moving them to existing buildings would save about $200,000 a year, Uplinger said.

One plan now being discussed would move the sixth-grade students at Margaret Bell Miller to the elementary school.

That school has available space and should be able to accommodate those students only by reconfiguring rooms, Uplinger said.

Moving seventh- and eighth-grade students to the high school, however, would involve “a lot more moving parts,” he said, and could require renovations or construction.

Any plan to bring the middle school students into the high school would also involve separating the younger middle school students from the older high school students, Uplinger said.

Uplinger said he expected the board to hire an architect next month or in September. At the board’s regular meeting, following the committee meeting, the matter was not discussed.

Implementation of any plan to consolidate the schools probably would not take place until the 2019-20 school year, Uplinger said.