File photo
The former Village Park Elementary School in Falls Township will be home to a new Pennsbury School District program for students with behavioral and emotional issues.
The school board voted to approve the creation of the Village Park Academy. School Board President Jacqui Redner and members T.R. Kannan, John Palmer, Christine Toy-Dragoni, Christian Schwartz, Josh Waldorf, and Debra Wachspress voted for the plan. Board members Nancy Lawson and Gary Sanderson were not at the meeting.
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Despite their vote to approve the plan, Kannan, Wachspress, and Waldorf raised some concerns about the speed of the creation of the new Village Park Academy.
The new Village Park Academy, according to district officials, could serve as many as 75 students in its first year in operation. Students with various behavioral and emotional issues from Pennsbury and other districts, whose home school system would pay tuition, would bring several contracted programs under Pennsbury’s oversight. The students served would be from grades four through 12.
“We are truly confident that we are well equipped to provide a program that offers mental health services along with a well designed, engaging curriculum that will support our students’ academic, social, emotional and behavioral needs. We always look for ways to ensure that the district is building a continuum of support for all students that makes us less dependent on outside providers to offer the support and services that may be required,” Pennsbury Special Education Director Sherri Morett said in a statement.
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The plan is for the district’s cost to come in around the same as it is to send students to similar programs not run by Pennsbury.
Many of the students would be brought back from the contract LifeWorks program, which rented the building last year for $250,000.
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In June, LifeWorks came before the school board to try to push back the creation of the Village Park Academy so they could find a new building.
The Village Park building on Unity Drive, which sits on the large high school campus, closed as an elementary school in June 2014. At that time, the district said they expected to save more than $1 million a year in costs to run the facility.
