Within the rural area of Southern Pennsylvania, Tuscarora School District contains six schools: four elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school. Each elementary school has zoning boundaries to assign where each student will attend elementary school  in the district, and one of these schools is not getting as many students compared to the other three schools.

Montgomery Elementary School is having a predicament with enrollment numbers within the community. In order to solve this problem, Superintendent Rodney Benedick and the TSD Board of Directors have been gathering data. 

“There was an enrollment study from March of 2018: our enrollment is shrinking substantially, and, from this study, it’s supposed to shrink for the next 10 years,” said Benedick.

Other than the enrollment of the school, some decisions were being processed from many board meetings, committee meetings,and also public meetings about this topic. 

“The decision process has been deferred. We could be a year or more from actual decisions deep into this point,” said Benedick.  “The Board feels like they haven’t had time or input to make a decision yet.”

With all of the discussions and meetings, the Board wanted to announce this topic to the public to see what people might think of this.

“We had five different public sessions about this topic, we did School Reaches and put it in the paper, and not a lot of people paid attention to the early part of it, until the option phases came out, that’s when people really got involved in it because it becomes real by that point,” Benedick said. 

Another thing that we had to talk about was the pros and cons about this decision. This was important because people can have a plan on what would happen if Montgomery were to shut down.

“The pros would be to even out class sizes in our elementary schools said Benedick. ”The cons are nobody likes change, no one likes to have schools close.”

It’s a controversial topic because it impacts the community and the education of students.

“It’s a combined effort of the Board and the community to make the recommendation for what is right for our kids,” Benedick said.