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August 3, 2012

MCBOE looks at bringing students back to Ceres

By MATT CHRISTIAN Princeton Times

PRINCETON — The Mercer County Board of Education took a step toward building a new elementary school for the children of Green Valley on Tuesday evening.

Superintendent Deborah Akers asked the board if they would consider making the changes necessary to help secure funding for the construction of a new Ceres Elementary School.

Akers explained that she, Robert Holyroid, and School Building Authority’s Mark Manchin had recently toured the school on Airport Road, but that Manchin made it clear that the school needed to have 300 kids in it to make it competitive and meet the SBA’s economies of scale requirements.

“We’ll have to bite the bullet and change the districting and our ten year plan,” Akers said.

President Greg Prudich said he believed neighboring Glenwood was full of students anyway.

Akers responded that they couldn’t simply take all of the 180 or so students necessary to put 300 at Ceres. If the board did that, it would affect the funding and usability of Glenwood.

Then, the board began to decide where the other kids would be coming from. Prudich narrowed it to two schools — Brushfork and Princeton Primary.

However, Board Vice President Gilbert “Gene” Bailey reminded the rest of the board that getting parents to accept the change of schools was not going to be easy.

“They’ll fight that harder than they’ll fight consolidation,” Bailey said.

It also bothered Bailey that the school stood a few feet from Airport Road which he called a major highway.

As the board seemed to be in favor of moving ahead with applying for the funding, Akers laid out what it would take to get funding. The board needed to find an architect and do conceptual drawings, locate a suitable site, and amend its ten year plan.

Prudich said, “We’ll definitely go ahead. It was the next school that we had planned on replacing so we need to go ahead.”

— Contact Matt Christian at mchristian@ptonline.net.

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