Petition prompts panel to revisit vote to move pupils

HERMON – For months, a local citizens group has been collecting signatures in an effort to override the school committee’s January decision to move the town’s fifth-graders this fall from the elementary school to the middle school.

A total of 192 signatures was submitted to the town office Thursday and verified. The town attorney is reviewing the petition, which will be presented next Thursday to the Town Council, according to Town Manager Clint Deschene.

Now that the petition group has collected enough signatures for a local referendum vote in June, however, the school committee has decided to revisit the vote at Monday’s meeting.

If the committee repeals its 3-2 vote in favor of the move, the petition will become moot.

“I’m hoping the school committee will add credibility to the whole thought and reverse the decision,” Wendy Berglund, a petition organizer, said Friday.

Berglund said she requested that the committee revisit its decision after the end of a 90-day grace period.

“I think it’s a really broad spectrum of the community,” Berglund said of the petition support.

The group needed at least 186 signatures, or 10 percent of the number of voters in the last gubernatorial election, to get a local referendum.

Efforts to reach Superintendent Patricia Duran were unsuccessful Friday. She previously has said that she met with Berglund and petition organizer Shelley Snow and she hoped their conversations would continue.

The relocation, with an estimated cost of $10,000, is designed to alleviate crowding at the elementary school, which now includes kindergarten through fifth grade. Hermon Middle School, however, has room for the nearly 70 pupils who will enter the fifth grade next year, according to school officials.

Petition organizers argue that the children will be rushed through a critical year of development by mixing with older pupils.

“Almost everybody I asked was willing to sign it,” said Berglund, who has a daughter entering the fifth grade this fall. “We tried to target the whole, entire community.”

The fifth-graders will be housed in a separate wing at the middle school, but will use a computer lab also used by seventh- and eighth-graders. They will have recess after eating lunch in a split shift with the sixth-graders and will have a restroom separate from the older classes.

The move is expected to allow for a reconfiguration of classroom use at the elementary school.

Even if the school committee stands by its decision, Berglund said she and other petitioners have taken a positive step in taking responsibility for the future of Hermon’s youngsters.

“We know we’ve done everything we can do as citizens,” she said.