Talk Of Moving 5th Grades To Manchester Middle School Shelved

MANCHESTER, NJ — The Manchester Township School District has shelved discussions of moving the district's fifth graders into the middle school after getting the results of a feasibility study and an enrollment demographics study.

The decision to not move forward was announced at the Sept. 27 Board of Education meeting.

Board President Gayle Mount said the demographers hired in February met with board members in September. The results led to the decision to not make changes.

"The most fiscally responsible thing to do is stay with the status quo," Mount said. "If enrollment continues to rise we will need architectural changes to accommodate more students."

The district had been exploring options for reconfiguring the schools for several months, in part after receiving a Preschool Expansion Grant from the state Department of Education.

One idea that had been explored involved turning Whiting Elementary School into an early learning center to house the district's preschool students. All of the fifth-grade classes would have been moved to Manchester Township Middle School so Ridgeway Elementary and Manchester Township Elementary could accommodate all the kindergarten through fourth grades.

Superintendent John Berenato said the feasibility study found Whiting Elementary was not workable because a number of the classrooms do not meet the square footage requirements for preschool classrooms and it would have required waivers from the state Department of Education.

The other problem was converting Whiting to an early learning center would mean transporting students from all over town to that school, which was something Berenato said was a concern for him from the start.

Manchester received its first Preschool Expansion grant from the state Department of Education in the fall of 2022, with the intent to continue to increase preschool enrollment — part of the state's requirement for those grants.

Moving the district's fifth-graders to the middle school was nixed because "it would exceed the functional capacity of the building in years to come," Berenato said.

The district's current configuration — preschool through fifth grades at the three elementary schools, sixth to eighth grades at the middle school, and ninth through 12th grades at Manchester Township High School — will remain in place through at least the 2024-25 school year, Berenato said.

The feasibility study and demographics study give future boards information as a starting point, he said.

Increases in enrollment are anticipated over the next 10 years; a 519-unit apartment complex is expected to begin construction now that sewer lines for it are being laid along Colonial Drive.

The feasibility and demographics studies also attempted to explore increasing the send-receive relationship with Lakehurst to potentially expand it to sixth through eighth grades. The Lakehurst board rejected it twice, Berenato said at the April 2023 meeting.

Berenato said the idea was it would allow Lakehurst middle school students to join Manchester students "at an organic time when all the elementary students converge for their middle school journey."

"This was an earnest attempt to enhance our existing partnership with Lakehurst and afford all students the best educational opportunities available," he said at the time. "This was never about regionalization but about unifying our communities at an earlier stage in our students’ academic career."