You can also read announcement here: /DocumentCenter/View/13718/Community-Letter-41522
Status Update on New Mansfield Elementary School
April 15, 2022
Dear Mansfield Community,
The excitement about our new elementary school grows weekly as the building shape is completed and is readied for installation of the exterior finishes. As many of you are aware, this is a challenging time to build anything, especially a large school with many components that need to be obtained from various suppliers.
At yesterday’s School Building Committee meeting, we learned that our contractor, Newfield Construction Company, again revised the completion schedule. It is now evident that the building will not be completed prior to the start of school on September 6. Newfield has indicated that delays in the delivery of essential mechanical and electrical equipment, and uncertainty about the site completion have impacted the completion of Mansfield Elementary School.
The school administration team has been following the schedule for many months and knew that having a “Plan B” for the start of next school year would be prudent. Development of the details of Plan B is now underway. The plan will ensure that we meet the goals that we had established when we began the consolidation process: creating community among all students and staff and continuing to provide the depth and breadth of programming that is experienced now.
Southeast School is scheduled to be demolished this summer, and therefore, Plan B will have all students begin the year at the remaining two elementary schools. To support our goal of creating community, we want to ensure that the teacher a child is assigned to in the fall and the classmates the child meets, will be consistent throughout the year. To accomplish this, all students in one grade will be in the same building. Children in grades PreK, K, and 1 will open the year at Vinton School while children in grades 2, 3, and 4 will begin the year at Goodwin School.
Although staff and students will be located across two buildings for a few months, they will be a single Mansfield Elementary School. There will be lots of specific information about the details of the fall opening in the coming weeks but, in the meantime, there is one detail that may help with your planning. Transportation is a critical consideration in any alternate plan and does present some limitations on how we structure this plan. One concern is the amount of time children will be on buses and the other is the disruption this plan may cause families. We reached out to our bus company some weeks ago and are pleased to share that they are able to create bus routes that do not exceed the length of ride time experienced by students currently AND allow siblings to be on the same bus even if they are attending different schools. This would allow for pick-up and drop-off times to be the same for all children in a household.
Mansfield school families should be on the lookout for more detailed communications in the future. We will also hold a series of family conversations to provide you with an opportunity to ask questions and help us work out some of the finer details.
Despite this setback in the construction schedule, the future remains bright with lots of excitement about the opportunities in the new school. In Mansfield, our school staff does a great job creating community and caring for our youngest residents. We are confident that this spirit will continue and that our children will receive a "Mansfield quality" education while we continue the journey to one day coming together in our new school.
Sincerely,
Kelly M. Lyman Ryan J. Aylesworth
Superintendent of Schools Town Manager