NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson USD 308 Superintendent Dr. Dawn Johnson said Tuesday that the crisis in lack of teachers was the reason that the decision to close Lincoln Elementary and combine with McCandless was made.
"We're still sitting at 18 vacancies in elementary education," Johnson said. "We have others in the middle schools and the high school, but 18 in the elementary. The last week of April, mid-April, we started saying we really have to start making some decisions. We got elementary principals together, had conversations with them. Maybe in a previous district, some of our principals ran areas the size of around 500. Most of ours were right around 200 to 250. We started talking about the possibility of combining them. McCandless is a larger school that can hold up to 400 as a three track school. We started taking a look at, if we converge on McCandless, how do we take the schools in those proximities and see what we could do. We took a look at Faris and we took a look at Lincoln and created some criteria to make sure that we were staying true to solving the teacher shortage."
Ultimately, in order to keep the entire schools of students together, the way the math worked best was closing Lincoln.
"All of the students at Faris wouldn't fit over into McCandless," Johnson said. "We'd have sixth graders out there by themselves. We could make K-5 move, we just couldn't make K-6 move. What were we going to do with those sixth graders? We just continued to run different models and work with Schaffer, our architecture company that's working with us. The fit for the number of students in the space we had, it just made the most sense for Lincoln to move up."
Current Lincoln principal Paul Carver, who will be the combined building principal next year, talked about the emotional impact of closing a school where generations have attended.
"The biggest thing is the emotional impact right now," Carver said. "That became really apparent. As the new principal here in town, I was talking to families who their grandparents went to Lincoln. I've seen pictures of Lincoln as it evolved from its original structure. I think it's important to acknowledge and appreciate the history and the idea that Lincoln is a special and unique place. I don't think we can devalue that. An important first step of that is to acknowledge the challenge that this will place on families. Part of that is just being there with them. I think that's a really good skillset that our Lincoln staff and families have is that ability to work together and really process those things. At the end, I think we're just mutually supportive of each other and that's what's going to keep us aloft."
Also, in order to make the numbers work, the students that were going to be shifted from Graber to McCandless will now stay as Graber students going forward.
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