The Manitowoc Public School District may be closing some more schools.
The school board will hold a special meeting tonight starting at 6:00 p.m. at the district’s administrative office on Lindburgh Avenue to hear from the district’s Facility Advisory Committee (FAC) recommendations for the future of the district.
In a PowerPoint presentation made public by the district, the FAC has been working since February this year to hear about enrollment trends, financial conditions, and a facilities overview in the district.
Right now, the district is seeing enrollment slowly falling since the 2019-2020 school year. At the time, the district had about 5,000 students.
But with the way the district is trending now, it looks like they will be closer to 3,500 students by 2033.
One reason is the aging population in Manitowoc County.
Superintendent Lee Thennes has also been working with the school board to get some facility fixes done after a financial audit says the district needed about $161 million in maintenance needs.
After the facilities committee heard about the trends, they were asked to create their own district, meaning committee members worked to decide how many schools should be around for students, and how the grade structure should work.
After much discussion and work from the committee, they’ve decided that the board should consider the closure, repurposing, or selling of up to three elementary school buildings while changing the middle schools to have one building serve 5th and 6th grade students, and the other have 7th and 8th grade students.
Superintendent Thennes spoke to the Manitowoc Common Council about the issues on Monday (October 20th) while explaining the district’s seven-part district vision.
“So what’s about ready to occur in the district over the next couple of months are going to be hard,” he explained. “And they are going to be emotionally driven by some because we are going to have to decommission some of our schools to make sure that we’re right-sized moving forward.”
Thennes says there will be community input allowed as the district works through what’s next.
However, he told the council it’s time to react to what the trends are telling them.
“My goal really is, by the turn of the calendar year, to have a voted-on solution for what we’re going to do with consolidation,” he noted. “That way we can get busy and make sure it happens for the next school year.”
Other considerations the school board could look at in the future include creating equitable education experiences for all students, continuing to look at physical capital improvements, and looking at operational and educational benefits of shifting grade configurations.
The school board will not take any action tonight (October 22nd), and there is no recommendation about which schools could be closed yet.
