Independent or Consolidated?

From the Inquirer.

Note the Emperor: I'll only talk by email and Reiter's closed so kwitcherbellyachin.

Monica Yant Kinney: How a district's small size can magnify its challenges
By Monica Yant Kinney Posted on Sun, Feb. 15, 2009, Inquirer Columnist

If Gov. Rendell intends to push for statewide school consolidation, he should make Morrisville the first stop on a listening tour. Presuming he can handle the drama.

In the itty-bitty Bucks County community, Rendell would find parents who suspect the school board cares more about dismantling the district than educating children.

Plans for a new school for kindergarten through 12th grade crumbled after one board paid $2.5 million in fees to annul a previous board's $30 million construction bond - all in the name of saving taxpayers money.

Some locals love the walkable community's old-timey intimacy. Others, wary of old-timey facilities, desperately want to merge with a larger district - even though previous pleas were rebuffed by suburban snobbery.

Most everyone in Morrisville agrees they got lucky when the boiler exploded at M.R. Reiter Elementary on a December weekend. No children were killed.

But what to make of last week's asbestos scare, which briefly closed Morrisville Middle/Senior High?

"Parents are in the dark," says Damon Miller, so disgusted he's running for the school board. "Nobody trusts anybody. This town doesn't know what it wants."

Maybe not. But when your child's future is at stake, does Harrisburg know better?

Home, casa
Named after Robert Morris, who financed the American Revolution, Morrisville occupies two square miles hard by the Delaware River across from Trenton.

The 10,000-person borough is 75 percent white, 19 percent African American, 5 percent Latino, and 1 percent Asian. Forty-three percent of all residents rent.

Diversity and transiency define the 831-student school district, which has been known to receive 11 enrollments in a single day.

When Superintendent Elizabeth Yonson arrived four years ago, only 11 percent of 11th graders were proficient in math on state achievement tests. By 2008, the number had jumped to 55 percent.

In 2007, Morrisville third graders topped all test-takers in the county, which still has Yonson beaming.

"You know how wealthy the rest of Bucks County is. My parents can't even afford a quality pre-K."

So she sought grants, and now Morrisville offers preschool. And college-credit courses for teens.

"Last year, one of our grads started Penn State's main campus as a sophomore!" Yonson raves.

All this and more have parents like Ann Perry committed to saving the schools, not scrapping them.

"We don't want to send Emma to private school," Perry says of her first-grade daughter. "Life is not private school."

What now?
Morrisville Mayor Tom Wisnosky can't recall how many consolidation talks have taken place in his lifetime. He just knows they rarely surpass stereotypes of race and class.

"One time, people said that merging with Morrisville would lower their property values," Wisnosky tells me. "That's just one of the lies perpetuated about us."

Since the last letdown in 2004, he and others got behind the idea of building new - only to see that movement halted by a costly changing of the school-board guard.

"So what's the plan?" asks an angry Lisa Castillo as she picks up her daughter from Grandview Elementary, which took in students scattered by the explosion at Reiter. "We don't want our kids educated in trailers for 20 years."

School Board President Bill Hellmann would talk to me only via e-mail. He says that Reiter will remain closed, and that he'd like to renovate the two other schools.

As for Rendell's bold proposal to forcibly squeeze 500 districts across the commonwealth into 100?

Some say the governor is tilting at educational windmills, but Hellmann believes it's the right idea in taxing times.

"Morrisville," he writes, "is really too small to have our own school district."

Contact Monica Yant Kinney at myant@phillynews.com or 215-854-4670. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/yantkinney