Elizabeth Forward shuts down rumors about school closures

By LIAM BELAN
lbelan@yourmvi.com
With rumors of school closures and other changes in the Elizabeth Forward School District swirling around social media, the district’s school board wasted no time quashing those rumors during Wednesday’s board meeting.
There was at least one Facebook post ahead of the meeting stating that the district had plans to close down three elementary schools, William Penn, Greenock and Mount Vernon, and consolidate all K-2 students at Central Elementary, 3-6 students at EF Middle School and 7-12 students at EF High School.
The meeting was packed with attendees who seemed curious about what they were reading online, but things were quickly cleared up.
“I know there’s a lot of chatter out there, but I will say that there’s nothing on this agenda tonight that has anything to do with closing any schools,” board President Thomas Sharkey said. “What the board is doing at this point in time is evaluating all of the factual information and accumulating that with experts to make decisions for our students today and our students in the future.
“We, as a board, don’t want to make decisions today that are counterintuitive to what we have to do for our students in the future. What we are doing is accumulating all those things. Those things are students, education, community, staff, cost to educate, the size of the insurance claim; all of these things go into it. That’s what’s going on.”

To read the rest of the story, please see a copy of Thursday’s Mon Valley Independent, call 724-314-0035 to subscribe or subscribe to our online edition at http://monvalleyindependent.com.