Bishop Hoffman closing school as part of reconfiguration

FREMONT – Bishop Hoffman Catholic Schools will close St. Joseph Elementary School at the end of the school year, as the school district moves forward with reconfiguration plans that include the possible creation of a future junior high academy and new preschool class at the district’s Sacred Heart school campus.

Superintendent Tim Cullen and Kay Reiter, the district’s governing board chairwoman, talked Tuesday about the recommendation to the Toledo Diocese to close the St. Joseph building and the district’s plans looking ahead in the fifth year since Bishop Hoffman’s consolidation.

Beginning with the 2015-16 school year, Bishop Hoffman students in grades K-6 will attend school at the Sacred Heart campus, with students in grades 7-12 going to the St. Joseph Central Catholic High School building.

Cullen said a specially selected reconfiguration committee looked at the age of the St. Joseph building, plus factors such as enrollment projections and increased technology becoming available at the Sacred Heart and St. Joseph Central Catholic High School campuses, before reaching their recommendation.

“It was not an easy decision for them to make,” Cullen said.

Cullen said this year’s fifth-grade students would be at the SJCC campus just for the 2015-16 school year, with the plan being to have the district’s sixth-graders attend classes at Sacred Heart in all subsequent school years.

“We just didn’t want to move the one group of students two years in a row,” Cullen said.

Reiter said the committee toured each of the district’s buildings at least twice and discussed a number of possible scenarios, including leaving all of Bishop Hoffman’s school buildings open.

She said the committee looked at the age of the St. Joseph building, as well as Sacred Heart’s abundance of green space, handicapped accessibility and technology capabilities, as they reached their decision.

The board started looking at reconfiguration in the summer of 2014 at a strategic planning retreat, with a review of the district’s technology needs, curriculum, class sizes, faculty and staff, and buildings.

It put together a short-term task force to look at those issues, and the task force came back to the board with 11 recommendations and a 50-page report at the board’s Dec. 28 meeting. The board voted in a special session to close the St. Joseph campus in late January and sent a recommendation to the Toledo Diocese for approval.

Reiter said there also stakeholder meetings in December at St. Joseph’s parish. Cullen said all parties at the St. Joseph school had been informed of the board’s decision through newsletters and the district’s website.

She and Cullen said the board hoped the reconfiguration would ultimately build enrollment at Bishop Hoffman.

The district’s five-year enrollment projections show a drop in students in the first year of reconfiguration, Cullen said, with enrollment numbers increasing in the second year.

Cullen said it has not been determined what will be done with the St. Joseph elementary school building once it is closed. He said the Rev. Michael Zacharias will determine plans for the building, which is owned by the diocese.

Reiter said the district has a strong pre-K program and needs to continue with efforts to get more parents interested in the district’s offerings for younger students.

Cullen said the expectation is that the majority of staff and faculty in the district will remain unchanged. He acknowledged there may be some staff reductions, but said those decisions have not been made.

“The goal of this wasn’t to reduce staff. The goal was to provide increased quality programming and an increased Catholic education,” Cullen said.

He and Reiter said the feedback from parents, parishioners and staff on the decision has been mostly positive so far, with questions about how the transition of students and classes from St. Joseph to the other buildings will work out.

Cullen said the district will have an open house in the spring for the Bishop Hoffman community, with display boards demonstrating the reconfiguration of the campuses.

The superintendent said the district will complete a logistics plan on the reconfiguration and the transition within the next six weeks, with that plan including budget and staffing levels for the next school year.

dacarson@gannett.com

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Twitter: @DanielCarson7