Coatesville district is closing 2 elementary schools, opening a new one, and realigning boundaries

The Coatesville Area School District will soon see a swath of changes as it prepares to shutter two elementary schools at the end of the school year, open a new one, and realign its attendance boundaries to ensure equity amid the transition.

The new map, approved by the school board Tuesday, splits the district into four geographic regions, intended to keep communities together while maintaining ethnic and socio-economic balance, according to the district’s presentation.

“We’re proud of our diverse population that we have in Coatesville, so we were looking to sustain that in each of our elementary schools as well,” the district’s superintendent, Anthony P. Rybarczyk, said in an interview Thursday.

The update, slated to take effect next school year, comes as the district has been rolling out a new facilities plan over the last several years, while its enrollment has declined and its budget has been squeezed by charter schools. When students leave Caln and East Fallowfield elementary schools for the summer, the two nearly century-old schools will close permanently. The schools, which both serve kindergarten through fifth grades, enroll roughly 730 students between them.

Under the new attendance zones, families in the Indian Run Village are being reassigned to Kings Highway Elementary School. Families in the area of Millview Park will be reassigned to Kings Highway, rather than split among three of the district’s elementary schools. The community divided by Barley Sheaf Road will now attend Reeceville Elementary. The district began communicating the changes Wednesday.

“Geographically, it made sense,” Rybarczyk said during the school board meeting. “We met with transportation as well, they were very promising in how they said this could save time on their runs and avoid the crossovers between going from one community to the next.”

The middle school feeder pattern will be split into two sections, with Kings Highway and Reeceville matriculating to North Brandywine Middle School. Rainbow Elementary School and the new Doe Run — which will open in August on the former South Brandywine Middle School site — will feed to Scott Middle School.

Fourth graders at elementary schools will be “grandfathered in” to complete their fifth-grade year at the elementary school they’ve been in, even if its enrollment is set to shift. The district plans to ask parents to provide transportation for those students next year, Rybarczyk said.

As the district winds down two of its schools, it will celebrate their history over the summer, with legacy walks and celebrations.

“The great thing about Coatesville is the children are in the schools where their parents went,” he said.

The district will keep the buildings, with an eye toward potential growth in the future, Rybarczyk said, though the district has no immediate plans for them.

The schools’ closure and the opening of Doe Run Elementary School are part of a broader effort to update the district’s aging facilities, which Rybarczyk said would continue next year.

“I think the community has been looking for something like this for a long time as well,” he said.

With “a shift of a number of charter school families coming back to our district” and new development, Rybarczyk said he believes the district could see its enrollment grow. Its campaign to bring students back from cyber and charter schools, launched alongside its upgrading of facilities in the last few years, has gained back 64 students, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.

“We’re going to see what the need will be in the future, because we could have an influx where we need to repurpose them in some way,” he said at the board meeting. “Obviously, they’re two older schools …There’s some work to be done if we were to repurpose those.”

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