A Rochester city school that was on the brink of closure will remain open.
The city school board took a different path after a show of force from the school community at a board meeting on Thursday.
Northwest Junior High on Fernwood Park was on the chopping block for next school year. The building itself would have remained open as a different middle school, but its identity — from its name to the state education department code associated with the school — would be gone.
The proposed closure was brought up at a school board meeting last month.
Lori Laloggia, a teacher at Northwest who said she’s been there since 1997, joined about a dozen staff and teachers who spoke out against the proposed closure during a public forum on Thursday.
“It is disturbing that it seems like Northwest has already been closed even before the board gets sufficient time to consider the proposal, get community feedback or explore various options,” Laloggia said as audience members clapped. “Human Resources already came to Northwest and presented us with paperwork, which is right here, that clearly states that Northwest is closing and how to transfer.”
Seventh grade health teacher Victor Ingrassia said closing the school and moving another middle school to the building would disrupt students' sense of community.
“There are many relationships and connections that teachers have made in the last three years while I've been there, and with our school being a bilingual school, that's a tremendous thing to worry about, because a lot of the students that don't speak any English struggle.”
Arts teacher Katie Breedy said her relative sense of permanence at Northwest has allowed her to help students in a way that was only possible with time. She’s been at the school for 20 years, she said, and on the first day of school last year she was called to the main office to respond to an upset student. When she got there, she saw a seventh grader who she didn’t recognize.
“He said, ‘My brother told me that if I was scared, I could find you and you would take care of me and help me.’ The consistency of my position at Northwest allowed me to make this connection,”
Board member Cynthia Elliott said the school’s low test scores cannot be overlooked.
“If we really did have relationships, I believe I would argue that we would see that in terms of academic achievement, and we do not see that from the data that I'm looking at in academic performance.”
Ahead of the vote, Interim superintendent Demario Strickland said one of the reasons for the proposed school closure was to prevent the school from entering receivership due to low performance. Another was to create space for a facilities modernization plan to be completed at other buildings.
The school board shot down the proposal to close the school. Elliott and board member James Patterson, while present for the discussion, were not present for the vote.
Five school board members voted down the measure.
