Goodbye, Consolidated?

(First published on GazetteXtra, 4-9-2010)

And I’m never going back
To my old school
- Steely Dan

As a resident of the Milton School District, I have been watching the current budget-balancing discussions with great interest. One item that strikes a particular chord with me is the potential closing of Consolidated Elementary School.

Growing up on a farm in Janesville Township, Consolidated is where I spent the first six years of my school life. At the time I attended, the majority of the student population was “farm kids,” and the appearance of subdivisions was a fairly recent development. If you’ve been in that area of the county lately, you know that the farm kids are a small minority now. The fields where I once spent summers baling hay are now paved over with streets and dotted with homes, and the house where I grew up is no longer surrounded by a barn, silos, corn cribs and sheds.

It’s hard to believe that this four-classroom, K-3 school once housed students through eighth grade. But it did until the current Milton High School was built in 1964 and the old high school building became a junior high. Because of the timing of that, my family has the odd coincidence that each of my siblings and I finished Consolidated in a different grade. My sister Nancy attended through eighth, my brother Tom through seventh, and my sister Jan through sixth. While I was attending, the district decided to end sixth grade there and ship those students to Milton West, so my Consolidated education concluded after Grade 5. That created another odd situation where I ended up going to three schools in three years and four schools in five years (Consolidated, West, Milton Jr. High, Milton High) without any kind of change in my residence.

As my first school, Consolidated was the site of many of my first “a-ha” learning moments. I can clearly remember the way our teacher demonstrated the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. He sent one lucky kid to the far end of the playground to pound on a metal pole with a baseball bat. Witnessing the delay between seeing the bat strike and hearing the noise made quite an impression on me.

As bad as my memory can be these days, I can easily recall the name of every teacher I had at Consolidated four decades ago – Mrs. Bottomley, Mrs. Huschka, Mrs. Wentzel, Mrs. Erdman, Mrs. Arndt and Mr. Socwell – along with many of the lessons I learned there.

So one would guess, with all of these fond memories, that I would be sad or upset that Consolidated sits on the chopping block. Well…yes and no. I can see both sides of the issue.

If there will really be the equivalent of four empty elementary classrooms in Milton while Consolidated’s four classrooms remain open, well, that’s something the school board needs to seriously look at while trying to close the budget gap. I understand the financial reality that may make it necessary to shutter the place, at least for now. The district’s other outlying elementary school, Harmony, was closed for a while but ended up reopening after massive growth by the city of Janesville into that area of the school district. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a similar situation down the road with Consolidated.

I know parents are concerned about losing their neighborhood school and subjecting their kids to long bus rides. I can relate. When my schooling shifted from Consolidated to Milton, I ended up spending two hours a day on the bus instead of five minutes. For a while, I was the first one picked up by the bus in the morning and the last one to be dropped off at night. I saw nearly every inch of the school district’s western half. I can tell you from experience that North River Road near the Four Mile Bridge is a long way from Milton.

In the end, I hope it’s possible to keep Consolidated open, but I would understand if the school board doesn’t feel that they can for 2010-11. Seeing it empty would be strange and somewhat sad, but no stranger than the major changes that have already occurred in the neighborhood.