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Students, Staff Bid Teary Farewell: Neighborhood School Closes to Make Way for Magnet

Posted on: Thursday, 15 June 2006, 06:01 CDT

By Doug Belden, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.

Jun. 15--The last day of school in St. Paul also was the final day for Parkway Elementary, and the annual sixth-grade graduation took on some extra poignancy Wednesday.

"We are the last sixth-graders graduating from this school," Porsha Bryant said to her classmates seated in the school's gym in their dress-up clothes. Fellow sixth-grader Maria Lara added later: "Parkway will not be Parkway, but it will always be to me."

The East Side neighborhood elementary is closing after 32 years to make way for the district's growing French-immersion magnet school, which will serve more than 400 students this fall.

The loss of Parkway means the loss of connections that only a neighborhood school can foster, staffers and students said Wednesday.

There were lots of tears as the staff came out to wave goodbye for the last time to students riding the bus home.

"Thank you for the nice letter. Good luck in junior high," one teacher said to a student.

"Bye, everybody. I love you!" yelled one girl from a bus.

The fact that there were only three buses to wave at -- and not all of them full -- is part of the problem for neighborhood schools like Parkway.

St. Paul Public Schools students may be bused from anywhere in the city to the 32 magnet or citywide elementary schools, but the 20 neighborhood elementary schools receive little or no busing.

As parents increasingly value the safety and convenience of a bus ride for their children (an estimated 95 percent of St. Paul students ride a bus to school), enrollment at neighborhood schools has been dropping.

Jack LaBrasseur, co-chair of Parkway's site council since 1999, sent four of his kids through the school. But for safety reasons, he now buses his youngest to a magnet school to avoid the three-block walk to Parkway.

Busing is "probably the ... No. 1 thing" he hears from parents about why they don't pick their neighborhood school, LaBrasseur said.

At the end, Parkway, with an enrollment of 284, was drawing only about one in five school-age children from its attendance area, and only filling about a third of its building capacity.

L'Etoile du Nord, the French-immersion school, has seen its enrollment nearly triple in the last five years, and it was out of space in its current facility in the Como Park neighborhood.

Moving the French-immersion school six miles east into Parkway's building also allows the district to save money by transferring some programs currently in short-term leased space into L'Etoile du Nord's building, which has a longer lease.

But those savings don't compare to the busing costs required to support the growth of the magnets, said Maxine Search, a teacher's assistant who retired last year from Parkway but was back Tuesday to say goodbye.

"They preach and preach and preach about a budget. Twenty million dollars for busing! That's terrible!"

Ruth Webster, media specialist at Parkway, said the closure is particularly hard to take given the school's recent academic gains with high-poverty students.

"(Turning the building over to French immersion) feels like it's giving the rich kids what they want," she said.

When a neighborhood school goes down, the community loses not just a school but a gathering spot, said Delores Newell, who attended school in the building and has worked at Parkway since 1991 as a teacher's assistant.

"I'm going to miss the chance to talk with the kids when we walk home," she said.

"It's kinda depressing because the school is the ... only place that we really know," said T.J. Salinas, a sixth-grader who has been at Parkway since kindergarten.

"(It's) in all our memories of school time," classmate Adisorn Lor said.

Members of the Parkway community hope some of those memories can be preserved at the school's playground, which was renamed "Penny Park" on Tuesday in honor of longtime Parkway vocal music teacher Margaret Heubach.

Heubach, nicknamed Penny at birth by nurses who were struck by her small size and shock of red hair, has been the heart and soul of the school since its opening in 1974. She was the main force behind getting the playground built, as well as a smaller one in front of the school.

When Deane and Sibley schools merged to form Parkway, Heubach said, the two staffs were given a year to work together and prepare for the change.

This time, Parkway staff were notified in early March of the proposed closure, and formal plans weren't announced until the end of the month. April "was really very grim here" as teachers wondered about job placements, which didn't come in many cases until into May, Heubach said.

"It wasn't right," she said. "It could have gone really beautifully."

Several parents and teachers have complained about how the process was handled, but interim superintendent Lou Kanavati said Wednesday he wouldn't do anything differently if he had it to do over.

"We have been upfront with the Parkway staff right from the beginning," he said. "Most of the staff that I talked to at Parkway were fine with the process and prepared to leave. There were two or three colleagues that kept stirring the pot."

As for Heubach, she said Wednesday's sixth-grade graduation left her "incredibly sad."

"Society wonders why we're having a problem with community," she said as she looked around the gym at the students and parents filing out. "You're breaking up the community."

Doug Belden can be reached at dbelden@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5136.

Parkway Elementary

The neighborhood school, which served grades K-6 at 1363 Bush Ave., was created in 1974 with the merger of Sibley and Deane elementary schools. It closed Wednesday, at the end of this school year, to make way for L'Etoile du Nord French-immersion magnet school.

Where the kids will go: The majority -- 81 students -- will go to Dayton's Bluff Elementary, as will two kindergarten teachers, a first-grade teacher and the librarian.

The rest of the students will be split among 26 other schools in the district. About 102 will wind up at magnets and 90 will be at neighborhood schools. The top five destination schools after Dayton's Bluff are: Battle Creek, 22; Frost Lake, 14; Farnsworth, 10; and Franklin and World Cultures, 6 each.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: Saint Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.)

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