With Tears, Pittsfield Officials Vote to Close Morningside
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The School Committee on Wednesday made an emotional vote to close Morningside Community School at the end of the academic year.
Officials identified the school's lack of classroom walls as the most significant obstacle, creating a difficult, noisy learning environment that is reflected in its accountability score.
Interim Superintendent Latifah Phillips said the purpose of considering the closure is centered on the district's obligation to ensure every student has access to a learning environment that best supports academic growth and achievement, school climate, equitable access to resources, and long-term success.
"While fiscal implications are included, the potential closure of the school is fundamentally driven by the student performance, their learning conditions, the building inadequacy, and equitable student access, rather than the district's budget," she said.
"… The goal is not to save money. The goal is to reinvest that money to make change, specifically for our Morningside students, and then for the whole school building, as a whole."
Over the last month or so, the district has considered whether to retire the open concept, community school at the end of the school year.
Morningside, built in the 1970s, currently serves 374 students in grades prekindergarten through 5, including a student population with 88.2 percent high-needs, 80.5 percent low-income, and 24.3 percent English learners. Its students will be reassigned to Allendale, Capeless, Egremont, and Williams elementary schools.
School Committee member and former Morningside student Sarah Muil, through tears, made the motion to approve the closure at the end of this school year. The committee took a five-minute recess after the vote.
Mayor Peter Marchetti commended Phillips for her administration's work on this proposal and said closing a school because of population decline has been a conversation throughout most of his tenure in city politics. He sees this as a way to elevate all Pittsfield students to the same level.
"As someone who grew up in Morningside, and I'm probably going to get myself in trouble for saying this: Just as people who grew up in the West Side, you were labeled. You were labeled. How do we start changing those labels? How do we start giving every kid a fighting chance? And I don't care if you belong to a millionaire or the poorest family in this community, how do we get you on a level playing field?" he said.
"… It is heart-wrenching to know that you're about to make a decision that is going to completely up a lot of people's lives, and I've heard a lot about how I'm going to negatively impact their lives. I'm looking at this that I might give them a fighting chance and a level playing field to be more than what they could be today."
In a memo to the committee, Phillips said the building is in poor condition overall, with "many" structural, accessibility, and building-system components at or beyond their expected life cycles; but most importantly, the open-concept classrooms.
About 25 percent of Morningside's current students qualify for bus transportation, meaning that the majority of the student population lives within 1.5 miles of the school. Final bus assignments will be determined at the conclusion of the student attendance zones, which is expected to be complete by early June.
The transition will prioritize maintaining student cohorts, preserving access to bilingual and family services, ensuring that receiving schools are prepared with behavioral and intervention staffing, preserving after-school and family engagement support, and creating culturally responsive onboarding plans and staff training. There will also be student visits and family transition events before the start of the school year.
School Committee members Heather McNeice and Muil spent the day at Morningside before the vote. McNeice said she has heard 50/50 feedback about closing the school. She said being an educator is a really hard job in the best circumstances, and the building is not providing the structure and the support that students and teachers need to thrive.
"I have to say that I think maybe some of the best educators that we have in Pittsfield are at Morningside because the work that they are doing is incredible," she said.
"It's one thing to teach students who are prepared to learn, who are well nurtured, who don't live in trauma, who certainly have had enough food and have energy for the day and don't have all of those things working against them, but to be a teacher for this population takes a certain kind of skill and a toolbox and I'm going to say after 30 years of teaching, some things I saw today were remarkable and they're not in my toolbox yet."
Throughout the weeks-long public comment period, some residents pleaded with the district not to close the school, fearful that their children would not have the same community and support at another school or would get bullied.
Resident Paul Gregory said he had no idea how important and valuable the Morningside school is to that part of this city, and the connections and the relationships that people have.
"And I know some of it's based on emotion, but at the end of the day, isn't it really emotions that matter and what people think and feel?" he asked.
Olivia Oberle, in her sixth year of teaching at Morningside, said the difference between Pittsfield schools is resources. In her first year of teaching at the school, her fifth grade class had 15 students. This week, she reported, a fourth-grade teacher accepted her 22nd student, and that student was one of six new arrivals at Morningside in the past two weeks.
"I agree that our students are not in the optimal learning environment, and I agree that they need more. There are extreme and very real challenges, and I am not going to sugarcoat the achievement levels at Morningside. It's not okay," Oberle said.
"I will call out again that the achievement levels at Morningside are drastically below the levels at other schools in our district, which is extremely segregated, and that is also not OK."
She reminded the committee that this is an "enormous" decision, and said four months is an "extremely" short time to account for all of the what-ifs and the changes.
District parent and therapist Patricia Molina agreed that PPS is segregated, adding that education in Pittsfield has become a privilege and not a right, "And that's not OK."
Ward 2 Councilor Cameron Cunningham supported closing the school and vowed to convert it into a safe, maintained, and beneficial hub for the Morningside community with programs and community spaces.
Similarly, Marchetti said he is committed to working with city and school officials to ensure the school remains a community hub.
"We know the gym, we know the cafeteria, and we know the community rec room that is there for meetings can be separated from whatever we want to do with the school as we go forward," Marchetti said.
"So there's a commitment that we will continue to recognize what we have there. We heard about free lunches. Well, there may not be a cafeteria at Morningside, per se, to produce them, but I'm sure that we can find a clever way, working with the superintendent and the folks in food services, to be able to deliver lunch to the community space every single day at Morningside."
Tags: Morningside, Pittsfield Public Schools, school closures,
