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Victims of overdoses remembered at Kirby Park event

<p>WILKES-BARRE &#8212; Two groups of people attending a public event in opposition to Wilkes-Barre Area School District&#8217;s consolidation plan may have been disappointed: Those expecting the school board to ignore an invitation and those expecting private investors to accept one.</p><p>Five board members, as well as the district superintendent and solicitor, sat in on the first half of the session, while local business man Bob Sypniewski was absent. Sypniewski was expected to show up with more details on a private investment proposal.</p><p>He has previously outlined a plan that would bring up to $300 million to pay for district construction. The investors would create a company and hire all contractors, with the district paying the money back over several decades.</p><p>Wilkes-Barre Councilman George Brown and attorney Kimberly Borland, who have played prominently in the consolidation opposition, said Sypniewski has not returned multiple phone calls in recent days.</p><p>The Sunday meeting, arranged by the newly formed nonprofit &#8220;Save Our Schools,&#8221; still sparked some lively applause and passionate support from about 150 people at Genetti&#8217;s Hotel and Convention Center.</p><p>Speakers evoking the most cheers included Borland, who garnered recurring applause as he posed &#8220;10 questions that must be answered&#8221; about the consolidation decision, and two members of a task force formed by the school board to study options for re-configuring the district.</p><p>Both men voiced dissatisfaction with the process.</p><p>School Board President Louis Elmy, Vice President Joe Caffrey and board members James Susek, Ned Evans and Dino Galella sat quietly at a front table as a panel of people dubbed the &#8220;SOS Public Forum Speakers&#8221; took turns criticizing the plan to close Meyers and Coughlin High Schools, consolidating grades nine through 12 in a new building at the Coughlin site.</p><p>Along with the five board members, District Superintendent Bernard Prevuznak and Solicitor Ray Wendolowski attended. From the start attorney Joe Borland, serving as moderator for the event, said the board members would not be asked to talk and likely shouldn&#8217;t because there were enough members present to make a quorum, barring them by law from anything that could be construed as deliberations.</p><p>All the district officials left during a break between the panel presentation and a public question-and-answer session.</p><p>Terry Schiowitz, president of the new SOS group, spoke first. She played off her experience as a nurse anesthetist who &#8220;puts people to sleep.&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;I can guarantee that is not my job today,&#8221; she quipped. &#8220;My anesthetist experience says wake up, open your eyes!&#8221;</p><p>Dr. Mark Schiowitz, chief of general surgery and Wilkes-Barre General Hospital who served a stint on the school board, rattled off the results of research he said proves larger schools don&#8217;t work as well as smaller ones, particularly in districts like Wilkes-Barre with high enrollment of minority and low-income students.</p><p>&#8220;Impoverished districts can suffer irreversible consequences when consolidation occurs,&#8221; he concluded. &#8220;People, we need a better plan.&#8221;</p><p>Richard Holodick, who spent 30 years in education, repeated a concern he has voiced several times as the consolidation project took shape: The district is moving forward with construction while it has yet to form a comprehensive education plan and curriculum.</p><p>&#8220;They still haven&#8217;t told us how a $100 million school will improve student achievement,&#8221; Holodick said. &#8220;A master plan will provide me with the information to make an unbiased decision (on school construction).&#8221;</p><p>Holodick prompted laughs when he offered the &#8220;dead horse&#8221; analogy. &#8220;If the horse you are riding dies, you get off. We don&#8217;t do that in education. We buy a stronger whip. We switch riders. We appoint a committee to study dead horses. We visit places that seem to be riding a dead horse better. We reclassify dead horses as living-impaired.&#8221;</p><p>Meyers soccer Coach Jack Nolan, a member of the &#8220;internal committee&#8221; of the task force formed by the district &#8212; there was an &#8220;external committee&#8221; of non-district employees as well &#8212; said the process seemed promising and open-ended at first, but took an abrupt turn &#8220;mid-stream.&#8221;</p><p>After weeks of meetings where the committee sifted through data and research assuming it had broad options, they were &#8220;called into a meeting&#8221; with district officials and the district&#8217;s financial advisors, and told they had to limit the cost to $100 million and their options to the two existing high school locations.</p><p>Nolan said they later learned the $100 million limit was related to the amount the district could borrow without a state-mandated referendum, a fact Wendolowski has previously conceded.</p><p>Nolan said options seemed further restricted when Board Member John Quinn &#8220;made a comment, I don&#8217;t know if he intended us to hear it, that Plains Township (students) would never come to south Wilkes-Barre,&#8221; suggesting only the Coughlin site was viable.</p><p>&#8220;We left that meeting thinking this decision was already made,&#8221; Nolan said. The internal committee continued its work, ultimately recommending all three high schools consolidate at the Meyers site, he added, but that recommendation was not initially made public.</p><p>David Wilson, a licensed architect who served on the external committee of the task force, said the committee accumulated &#8220;a lot of data,&#8221; but was given &#8220;no comprehensive plan to synthesize the raw data and make a recommendation.&#8221;</p><p>But Kim Borland spurred the most response from the audience with his &#8220;10 unanswered questions.&#8221; He opened his remarks with some self-chastisement, noting &#8220;this meeting should have happened two years ago,&#8221; then ran through the questions, often expanding one question with a litany of other, related queries.</p><p>&#8220;What is the educational impact for the proposed consolidation?&#8221; was his first question. &#8220;Within that, was there any study in the district with regards to education impact? &#8230; Were there any reviews of similar experiences in neighboring districts? &#8230; Is there any evidence a separate middle school is educationally preferable to junior/senior high schools?&#8221;</p><p>Borland also questioned the claim that consolidation would reduce operating costs, pointing out that under almost every scenario there are ultimately as many buildings as their are now, thanks to expansion at Kistler Elementary and renovation of the long-closed Mackin school building.</p><p>Borland also asked what the long-term plan is for GAR, which he noted has the most racially diverse student body in the district, as well as a high percentage of students from low-income families, &#8220;yet gets none of the benefits of the consolidated school.&#8221;</p><p>He cited a Facebook posting by Board Member Ned Evans shortly after the board voted to consolidate at the Coughlin location. The posting suggested GAR students will eventually be merged into the new building as well, ultimately making it a one-high school district.</p><p>Asked previously about the posting, Evans had said he is concerned that the district will ask taxpayers to fund a new school, only to be forced several years later to fund costly renovations at GAR.</p><p>And Borland argued there was no reason to rush the current consolidation plan because Meyers High School is safe enough to last for several years, and Coughlin students can be split between the newer annex that doesn&#8217;t have any severe structural concerns and the restored Mackin building.</p><p>In the end, Borland issued a &#8220;call to action for all of you.&#8221; He urged those present to attend board meetings, and to keep asking his 10 questions, as well as any others they may have.</p><p>&#8220;I ask you to insist on satisfactory answers to these questions,&#8221; he said. &#8220;And on election day, vote for candidates who met their stewardship responsibility and provided satisfactory answers, or vote for write-in candidates who will.&#8221;</p><p>While the crowd of 150 seemed respectable, SOS had arranged for up to about 400. A short while after the meeting, Kim Borland said via email that another 260 had watched the event via the live-streaming app &#8220;Periscope.&#8221;</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Members of the Wilkes-Barre School Board, as well as solicitor Ray Wendolowski, front, attended the first part of a &#8216;Save Our Schools&#8217; event in opposition to proposed school consolidation, held Sunday at Genetti&#8217;s Hotel and Convention Center in Wilkes-Barre. </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/web1_saveschools1_faa1.jpg</photo0><caption0>Members of the Wilkes-Barre School Board, as well as solicitor Ray Wendolowski, front, attended the first part of a &#8216;Save Our Schools&#8217; event in opposition to proposed school consolidation, held Sunday at Genetti&#8217;s Hotel and Convention Center in Wilkes-Barre. </caption0><photoCredit0>Fred Adams | For Times Leader </photoCredit0></div><div class="neFile"><img class="neImage" src="https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/web1_saveschools2_faa1.jpg">
<div class="neCaption">David Wilson, right, a member of a Wilkes-Barre Area School District Task Force that worked on school configuration options, answers a question from the audience at the &#8216;Save Our Schools&#8217; event Sunday, while attorney Kimberly Borland, center, and Wilkes-Barre City Councilman George Brown, left, look on. </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo1>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/web1_saveschools2_faa1.jpg</photo1><caption1>David Wilson, right, a member of a Wilkes-Barre Area School District Task Force that worked on school configuration options, answers a question from the audience at the &#8216;Save Our Schools&#8217; event Sunday, while attorney Kimberly Borland, center, and Wilkes-Barre City Councilman George Brown, left, look on. </caption1><photoCredit1>Fred Adams | For Times Leader </photoCredit1></div><div class="neFile"><img class="neImage" src="https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/web1_saveschools3_faa1.jpg">
<div class="neCaption">Wilkes-Barre Area School District soccer coach and task force member John Nolan holds up some documents from a Task Force report on proposed school consolidation during a &#8216;Save Our Schools&#8217; event at Genetti&#8217;s Hotel and Convention Center Sunday. </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo2>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/web1_saveschools3_faa1.jpg</photo2><caption2>Wilkes-Barre Area School District soccer coach and task force member John Nolan holds up some documents from a Task Force report on proposed school consolidation during a &#8216;Save Our Schools&#8217; event at Genetti&#8217;s Hotel and Convention Center Sunday. </caption2><photoCredit2>Fred Adams | For Times Leader </photoCredit2></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><subheadMeta>Private investors a no-show at public meeting</subheadMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Mark Guydish</p><p>mguydish@www.timesleader.com</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><factboxMeta><p><strong>Attorney Borland&#8217;s &#8220;10 unanswered questions&#8221;</strong></p><p>During a public meeting organized by the newly formed &#8220;Save Our Schools&#8221; group opposed to Wilkes-Barre Area&#8217;s School District&#8217;s current school consolidation plan, attorney Kimberly Borland offered 10 questions he said the school board must answer before proceeding with a project estimated at $100 million. Borland urged those present to insist the board answer all 10 questions.</p><p>1. What is the educational impact for the proposed consolidation?</p><p>2. What is the actual facilities plan for five years from today?</p><p>3. What happens to GAR High School and its community?</p><p>4. How will the redistricting lines be drawn?</p><p>5. What is the cost of improvements to Meyers?</p><p>6. What is the basis for suggesting that consolidation will reduce operating costs?</p><p>7. What are the prospects for state reimbursement of construction costs?</p><p>8. What effect will consolidation have on tax revenues?</p><p>9. Why were the reports of the internal and external task forces not considered?</p><p>10. Why not create and implement a master education plan now?</p></factboxMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Reach Mark Guydish at 570-991-6112 or on Twitter @TLMarkGuydish</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Attorney challenges Wilkes-Barre Area School Board to answer 10 questions on school project