GBAPS prepares to welcome students to combined buildings

• Meet an amateur local historian who stopped to take photos of Tank Elementary School in Green Bay after its closure at the end of last school year
• See where some Green Bay students will be compared to their previous elementary schools, which have since closed
• Hear some of the reasons behind the closures and how the district says they've been preparing students and staff

(The following is a transcription of the full broadcast story with additional details for the web.)

Green Bay students will be back in class in a week. Some of them will be in different buildings after the district closed three schools at the end of last school year.

As of Monday, it's a week until Green Bay public school students are in class again. I'm Pari Apostolakos at Tank Elementary School, one of three schools the district closed at the end of last school year. The district says they're ready for those students to be moved to their new schools.

John Geyer grew up visiting his grandparents who lived down the street from Tank Elementary School. Now a Kaukauna resident, he has fond and vivid memories of playing baseball on the field behind the school and using the playground. He was taking photos of the building Monday morning. I asked him what brought him there.

"Well, mostly nostalgia," Geyer said. "I go around and take a lot of pictures of the older buildings before they disappear, you know, in the Green Bay Area [I'm] a historian wannabe ... It's a little sadness to see it go."

The district says they expect 120 students once taught at Tank to attend Lincoln Elementary, they project 160 from Helen Keller will go to Kennedy and about 70 students are transferring from Wequiock to Red Smith.

I spoke with a mother of two who did not want to go on camera. But, she did tell me she signed her kids up for school elsewhere when she heard about the closings.

"We're consolidating schools because the three schools that we closed had very small enrollment," Lori Blakeslee from the Green Bay Area School District said, noting the closed schools had a total of around 100 students each. In addition, she says the cost of keeping up the aging facilities of the now-closed schools doesn't make sense financially.

Blakeslee says the possibility of increased class sizes was a common concern among parents.

But, board policy usually keeps those numbers for kindergarten through fifth grade at 25 students per teacher.

"If you're in a school with about 100 students, that meant that you didn't always have a social worker every day or a school counselor every day," Blakeslee said. "Now that you're in a little bit larger school, that means that those services are available to students every day."

Blakeslee says Lincoln, Kennedy, and Red Smith Elementary schools only have teacher openings in positions that are typically more difficult to fill, like special education and bilingual teachers.

She said the district has tried to make the transition as easy as possible for all involved.

"There were both planning opportunities and professional development opportunities with the staff at both schools, as well as there were opportunities for the students to get together [last school year]."

Blakeslee says there is still time for parents to go to an open house at their new school before classes begin.

As we have previously reported, three more schools are set to close within the next few years.