Students of Croydon’s Mary Devine Elementary School will likely be displaced as the Bristol Township School District embarks on a plan to replace nine aging schools with three new buildings.
Two of the new buildings will be built adjacent to the current James Buchanan and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Due to a high water table and floodplain, the new building at Mary Devine Elementary school property would have to build where the current building sits.
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If the new buildings plan goes forward – it currently appears it will – the current school in Croydon would have to leveled before work could start on a new $37 million building.
Superintendent Dr. Samuel Lee confirmed over the weekend that the Ben Franklin School on Mill Creek Road in Levittown is looking like the “best” option for the Devine students.
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The Franklin building is currently used as the district administration building.
Lee said the move would happen in September 2014 and the students would be in the new building when construction is completed, which district officials have projected as being September 2015.
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Former Catholic schools St. Thomas Aquinas in Croydon and Immaculate Conception in Levittown, Lee said, are too small for the district’s needs.
The estimated $152.6 million facilities overhaul would close Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School; Neil A. Armstrong Middle School and the former Benjamin Franklin School, currently home to the district administrative staff, would be renovated for middle school students. Harry S. Truman High School would not see any major work done. Clara Barton Elementary School would be re-purposed into the administration and maintenance building.
