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Warsaw Schools' superintendent Dr. Dave McGuire would much rather the public focus on what's going on in the schools than the controversy over closing three buildings.
Still, he believes he's on the right track by proposing saving the school corporation a minimum of $300,000 per year by closing Atwood, Claypool and Silver Lake schools.
"I don't know that having a school a block from their house is as important as the quality of education in that school," he said earlier this week. "... The sense of being a closed society is strong in small towns."
Point by point, McGuire went over the objections of parents and other patrons of Warsaw Community Schools, as well as those of the Concerned Citizens for Quality Education, explaining his position and the reasons for it.
Some parents are afraid their children will be bused into Warsaw and will become outsiders in a large school.
Not true, McGuire said.
"They'll be blended in as any other child," he said. "Claypool kids are gonna come to Eisenhower, and they're not gonna be Claypool kids anymore, they're gonna be Eisenhower kids."
Also not true is one of the fears that students bused in from smaller schools will be shunted into the portable classrooms at Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington elementaries, he said.
"We'll move the specials classes - art, music - to the portables if necessary and keep all other classes inside."
The portables are mostly self-contained, he said, with their own heating, air conditioning and restrooms. Any refurbishing that is necessary can be done in-house and he expects it to be minor.
What about the projected savings, considering the fact he has promised all the staff members at all three schools that they won't lose their jobs?
He said he believes WCS will eventually save more than $600,000 per year, though it may take a year or two to reach that amount because of the surplus of personnel the first year.
"We have really good people at those schools and we don't want to lose them," he said. He thinks that, with approximately 1,000 people on the WCS payroll, regular attrition will take care of any overage within a couple of years.
McGuire had no figures on hand for the additional cost of busing the rural students into Warsaw, but said, "The bus replacement line and the transportation line are separate funds and they're fine. We probably will have to add a route or two."
Redistricting, another concern of parents, will be done at the same time the schools are being readied for closing, he said, during the current school year so students won't have to change schools twice.
Why not cut nonacademic sports programs and staff and keep the smaller schools open?
"It doesn't generate the savings that we need," he said. The WCS budget was $551,000 short last year and will be approximately $1 million in the red for the 2003-04 school year, and while he doesn't want to cut sports, "we may end up having to curtail extracurricular activities anyway."
Those extracurriculars serve "literally a couple thousand kids," he said, "but I will cut those before I will cut teachers."
Students involved in extracurricular activities have higher grades, lower dropout rates and are less likely to be involved in risky behaviors, he said.
"To cut that before I would cut the inefficient schools just does not make sense to me," he said.
Some people have suggested he cut coaches and get parent volunteers.
"If we were in 'Ozzie and Harriet' land, that would work," he said, but with today's working parents, it's impractical.
McGuire sees three groups at work in opposing the plan. The first group, he said, comprises those residents who oppose any investment in the community. "They don't want to see government money spent because it comes out of their pockets."
The second group is "scared to death of reassessment and were convinced that they were not going to be able to afford their homes and that we were adding to that problem. They want to see taxes drop," he said.
The third group is not necessarily opposed to building schools, "they're opposed to closings. No matter what we say about closing - no matter what we say about anything - they're not going to understand. They're emotionally attached to those buildings."
He's opposed to turning the small schools into charter schools because he believes too many questions need to be answered about charter schools and that "the downside of charter schools is that it's market economics applied to schools."
He also is not in favor of moving sixth-graders into middle schools, though that is done in many other school districts.
"It was really evident that people on both sides of the issue were almost uniformly opposed to having sixth grade in middle school," he said.
Whatever the outcome, McGuire remains committed to the school system. "It's my community," he said. I've lived most of my life in and around Warsaw. ... There are no right answers. There's only the best answer for the moment."
