Senior Destinatio ns MaP Pages 6-7 Conestoga High School, Berwyn PA, 19312
Volume 74 No. 7
May 29, 2024
www.spoke.news
Faith Zantua/The SPOKE
Addressing enrollment: Students from Valley Forge Elementary School, which has the highest elementary enrollment rates in the district, board a school bus. TESD administration started extensively discussing solutions to the district-wide high elementary enrollment around the 2016-17 school year.
By Rowan Chetty and Faith Zantua, Co-T/E Life Editor and Co-News Editor For the past 59 years, Tredyffrin/Easttown School District students have attended five elementary schools: Beaumont, Devon, Hillside, New Eagle and Valley Forge. In fall 2027, a sixth school will open its doors.
On April 2, the district bought a 15-acre property at 1200 West Swedesford Road in an office park for more than $15 million. The district is beginning to convert the site, which includes a commercial building, to meet the needs of an elementary school. Superintendent Dr. Richard Gusick said that TESD pursued the project due to low elementary school space and high enrollment. The increased needs for special education, new changes
to the state science curriculum that the district must implement by the 2025-26 school year and interest in full-day kindergarten factored into the decision. “We don’t have enough space in our current elementary schools to meet all the programming needs that we have right now or will have,” Gusick said. “Our numbers of students in our existing schools, plus the demands for more specialized programming for students with special needs, plus the changes that are
coming with science instruction and engineering, plus the full-day kindergarten need — we weren’t going to be able to do it with the existing five schools.” The district started looking more extensively into solutions to the rising elementary enrollment rates around the 2016-17 school year. In 2018, TESD redistricted Devon, Beaumont and Hillside elementary schools to address the uneven distribution of students. During the COVID-19 pandemic, rates
lowered. They stabilized to the district’s current “steady, high enrollment,” according to director of educational program Dr. Michael Szymendera. Across all elementary schools, TESD has 130 classrooms, with one that is available for flexible use. Szymendera said that, of the 10 elementary school science labs, the district is reusing one for non-science instructional use. TESD predicts that it will need to repurpose two more labs to accommodate the increase in
student enrollment next school year. The district also combined and added rooms to the existing schools to make more space before it assessed properties for the new elementary school. “We often use the phrase ‘maximize the footprint’: An elementary school building has a footprint of the outside, and we can make some modifications to take advantage of every available space (inside),” Szymendera said. “We’ve really exhausted all of those ‘maximize the footprint’ strategies.”
District resident Jyothirmai Patwari, whose two children attend Valley Forge Elementary School, feels that the sixth elementary school will allow the district to provide better education with the additional space. “It is going to help the existing school district,” Patwari said. “Students are going to benefit. Teachers are going to benefit. The overall education will have more quality.” Continued on page 3.
District to implement new faculty induction program Eshan Singh Co-Copy Editor
Emily Wang/The SPOKE
Responding effectively: The Human Needs Network utilizes long-term mental health facilities, such as the Haven Behavioral Hospital of West Chester, to help those in crises. Chester County opened the system in mid-April to aid community members facing mental health or housing related issues.
County unveils crisis response initiative Emily Wang Staff Reporter
To improve responses to housing and mental health crises, the Chester County Department of Human Services and board of commissioners opened the Human Needs Network in mid-April. The county devised the idea in 2019 to improve information referral systems and better address mental health crises, beginning formal planning in 2021. Funded through American Rescue Plan Act grants, the network includes mobile resolution teams as well as walk-in crisis and local call centers. The calling stations, based in West Chester’s Government Services Center, utilize the 988
national mental health and 211 state human services hotlines. The county created and staffed the facilities in conjunction with Holcomb Behavioral Health Systems, a branch of the organization Chimes. Counselors work at the mental health locations, providing support and connecting people to mental health nonprofits. “We need someone on the phone who answers the phone quickly and then speaks to the person until their issue is resolved,” Chester County Commissioners’ Chair Josh Maxwell said. “Being able to control that phone system is really important.” Call centers remotely dispatch street outreach or mobile crisis resolution teams to connect callers to housing services or mental health hospitals, respectively.
Supervised by nonprofit Woods’ Legacy Treatment Services, the teams include two people: one clinician and one “peer,” someone who has previously gone through a crisis and can empathize with the caller. “We need someone to actually take an action to help those folks because they most likely aren’t in a position to help themselves,” Maxwell said. While the network has several long-term facilities, such as Haven Behavioral Hospital of West Chester, members are working to establish more short-term mental health inpatient facilities, as longterm facilities tend to be full. “It’s a safe place to help the person to stabilize, get their feet under them and then figure out what the next appropriate re-
source for them is,” said Patrick Bokovitz, director of the Chester County Department of Human Services. Call centers can also access technology that documents individuals and areas with a high frequency of calls. Additionally, facilities use an app that tracks the location of teams so that they can dispatch the one closest to the individual in crisis. It also documents the teams’ response times and if they used other resources, such as police intervention. “I do know that what we’ve set in place, the technology, will help us understand the needs,” Bokovitz said. “It’ll give us a sense of the trends, and subsequently, more quickly plan for what the next step needs to be.”
Beginning in the 2024-25 school year, all faculty members who are newly employed by the district will undergo a modified induction program, with the exceptions of aides and paraprofessionals. TESD changed the program in response to the Pennsylvania Department of Education extending the mandated length of induction from one year to two, in addition to mandating other changes to the process. “We’ve been required by the state to provide an induction program for a very long time,” said Dr. Wendy Towle, director of curriculum, instruction, staff development and planning. “It’s been modified slightly (before) but not a big change like this one.”
The district’s staff development advisory committee is responsible for designing the induction program. When the department changed the requirements, the committee decided to remake the induction process instead of just extending it. The state also requires that the program includes culturally responsive practices, structured literacy training and increased focus on professional ethics. Culturally responsive practices involve delivering instruction that includes multiple perspectives and looks at each student as an individual with specific needs. Structured literacy focuses on the foundational skills that are part of reading instruction, such as phonics, vocabulary and comprehension. Biology teacher Sabrina Bates joined the district in summer
2023 and received a mentor to help her transition to Conestoga as part of the current one-year induction program. Bates feels that the new two-year process will be beneficial to teachers as they will have a mentor for another year. “Having those extra supports will help prevent teacher burnout because they’ll have more resources available to them,” Bates said. Towle said that the district faces some logistical issues with managing the new program but feels optimistic overall. “One of the biggest challenges is that every year now, we will basically be running two separate induction programs: one for the people who are in year one and one for the people who are in year two,” Towle said. “But I think what we came up with in the end is really excellent.”
Eshan Singh/The SPOKE
Inducting staff: Biology teacher Sabrina Bates types on a computer. She joined the district in summer 2023.