On the web
See the slides from Tuesday’s presentation here
GREENFIELD — About 50 people attended a public information session Tuesday regarding Greenfield-Central Schools’ proposed restructuring.

The 75-minute presentation and Q&A were also livestreamed.

Superintendent Harold Olin, assistant superintendent Jason Cary and business manager Nate Day shared a number of slides throughout the presentation, outlining current and projected growth, class sizes and potential cost savings for the corporation.

The district posted slides from the presentation to its website, gcsc.k12.in.us, Wednesday evening.

The crowd at the high school consisted of parents as well as many G-C administrators and staff, all of whom gathered in the high school’s performing arts center to hear school leaders recap the highlights of the proposed plans.

Several in attendance stepped up to the mic afterward to share remarks. Many thanked the presenters for a data-rich presentation, while also questioning if the school district’s plans were in the best interest of students.

Olin said the proposed restructuring plans are intended to save the school money, capitalize on operational efficiencies and serve the best needs of students moving forward, as class sizes and enrollment continue to change.

In August, he gave a formal recommendation to the school board to restructure the district’s pre-K through sixth grade classrooms. The recommendations include:

1. Combining the two intermediate schools — Greenfield Intermediate and Maxwell Intermediate — into one at the Maxwell site.

2. Moving the current elementary students at Weston to the Harris / Greenfield Intermediate School site on Park Avenue, thus creating a larger Harris Elementary School.

3. Moving all preschool classrooms, which are currently spread out across three sites, into one site at the current Weston Elementary School.

Olin said school administrators believe all three goals can be achieved by the fall of 2027, but that combining the two intermediate schools into one could be done as early as the start of school next fall.

Earlier this year, school administrators enacted the plan to bring fourth-graders back to the elementary schools, which was carried out at the start of school in August.

Nine months would be plenty of time to combine the two intermediate schools by the start of next school year, should the school board so choose, he said.

Kristie Pendlum, a parent of a first- and fourth-grader at Weston, stepped up to the mic at the meeting, questioning the need to rush to make the changes.

Some students, including her fourth-grade daughter, could potentially cycle through three schools in three years, she said.

“If we move forward with a restructuring, some cohort, some class, will likely get caught up in that,” Olin said.

The goal is to find the most sensible solution for student distribution districtwide, he said, keeping cost savings and operational efficiencies in mind while creating the best possible experience for students.

Olin shared that a renowned demographer, Dr. Jerome McKibben, was hired by the corporation in February 2024 to conduct a comprehensive demographic study that projects the district’s enrollment over the next 10 years.

“The bottom line, he said looking out 10 years into the future, it looks like Greenfield-Central will likely have a subtle decline — 2.2% — which for us would be some 90 to 95 students … So it’s fairly stable, and a little bit of a decline,” he said.

Also in February 2024, consultants from Administrator Assistance shared their findings on the district, and recommended the restructuring and reorganizing of the school corporation, including changing grade level configurations, combining schools and repurposing schools and/or closing a school.

G-C administrators mentioned other options that had been considered: closing Eden Elementary, turning Maxwell Intermediate School into a K-5 building, using Greenfield Intermediate School for the combined intermediate school site, shifting Harris and J.B. Stephens elementaries to K-5 buildings, using Harris as the pre-K center, and/or adding a new wing to Greenfield Central Junior High School to bring sixth grade there. They also outlined reasons why they were instead recommending the current plan, among them that the cost would be substantially more — $15 million more.

Both Olin and Day pointed out the ramifications that Senate Enrolled Act 1 (SEA 1), the Indiana property tax reform bill, will likely have on public school funding, driving the district’s need to function at optimal efficiency.

Greenfield-Central’s operations fund is the one that will likely get hit the hardest, Day said.

“We estimate, along with our advisers from Policy Analytics, that we will receive $8 million less in revenue in the operations fund over the next five years, or approximately $1.6 million a year,” said Day. “That’s a $1.6 million hole in what we need to do to keep our buildings open and operating and safe and clean.”

The last slide in the presentation included email addresses for Olin (holin@gcsc.k12.in.us) and the school board (board@gcsc.k12.in.us) for collecting community member comments. The board’s next meeting will be 7 p.m. Monday at Greenfield-Central Educational Services Center, 700 N. Broadway St. A special meeting is also scheduled for Nov. 18.
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