Moon Township parents fight to save Hyde Elementary School
MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. (KDKA) — Moon Township residents continue to fight to save Hyde Elementary School in the Moon Area School District.
On Monday, parents filed into Moon Area Middle School's auditorium to continue to fight against the school's closure. Melissa Eiker attended the meeting. Her son is a fourth-grade student at Hyde Elementary School.
"We've been fighting for the last nine months, and they keep thinking that if they drag it out that we are going to stop," Eiker said. "They need to realize come August, the vote should be to keep five elementary schools."
Administrators said students at Hyde are struggling, as they do not have the same grades as kids in the other four elementary schools. Hyde is in the middle of the neighborhood it serves, which includes low-income families from other counties.
"There are a lot of great things that are happening there," parent Nicole Weiler said "I am terrified to see it close. A lot of the kids who wouldn't have this kind of access to education are in that school district."
Superintendent Barry Balaski defended the recommendation to close Hyde. He said most of the roughly 200 students would go to J.H. Brooks Elementary instead and teachers would not lose jobs.
"There's been a lot of information about overcrowding and classroom sizes," he said. "It does not change a classroom size. We would still have all the teachers we would have before, so classroom sizes are not going up."
Hyde was built in the 1950s and has never had major renovations. Balaski said the school needs about $10 million in repairs and closing the school would save the district about $1.2 million a year.
Still, some question how the closure would work.
"In two to three years, we will spend far more to add to the other elementary schools structurally than we would spend today keeping Hyde open," resident Nancy Augustine said.
State code says a school board can't vote to close schools until three months after a public hearing. That means August is the earliest possible date for a decision.