The fog swirls like wisps of pink cotton candy across the Pymatuning Creek valley as the Penn Line Church of Christ parking lot begins to fill shortly before 7 a.m.

If this were a Sunday, the evangelist would be ecstatic at the parishioners’ dedication. But this is a prosaic Tuesday morning, the kind that is lived, forgotten and repeated in 24 hours, five days a week.

The gathering is one of middle- and senior-high school students, their parents, grandparents and neighbors engaged in the task of preserving a way of life while getting an education. It is also a backlash against a school board the parents feel betrayed them and failed to respond to their concerns when it voted last January to close their community elementary school.

All of the 30 or so middle and senior high school students who gather at this church parking lot are residents of the Buckeye Local District. So are the 40 or so elementary students who catch the PV bus that pulls into the parking lot around 8:15 a.m.

The exodus, representing about 44 percent of Pierpont Elementary’s resident students at the end of the prior school year, is about what the district expected, said Nancy Williams, superintendent of Buckeye Local Schools. Fifty-one of the 92 kindergarten through fifth-grade students from Pierpont attend Kingsville Elementary this year.

Numbers for Braden Junior High have not been calculated, but Williams counted nine high-school students from the Pierpont area who withdrew to PV this year.

Alex G. Geordan, superintendent of PV, says the district has 70 Buckeye Local students attending under open enrollment, and he estimates “at least 35 of those are new, could be pushing 40.”

Open enrollment students are required to find their own transportation to the receiving school, but in the case of PV, arrangements were made for the buses to pick up students at the Penn Line Church on Route 6, which is on the far north edge of Richmond Township and Lakers territory. The first bus is a dedicated run for the open enrollment middle- and senior-high students. The second bus is an existing run that had room for the elementary youngsters.

“PV didn’t have to pick up the kids,” says Lynne Millard, an open-enrollment parent. “They bent over backwards to accommodate us.”

“PV has been really awesome in picking up all the Pierpont kids here,” says Ruthella Coder, who has twin boys in fifth grade. “I feel this has given us an opportunity to come together as a community.”

Indeed, since students went back to class less than two weeks ago, the parking lot has become an ad hoc Pierpont community center. Parents and students huddle in small groups or roll down their windows and talk across the row of vans. Neighbors take turns hauling the youngsters to and from the stop.

Julie Higley brings her daughter, Hannah, a fourth-grader, plus three neighbor youngsters for the elementary run. A neighbor brings her son, a ninth-grader, for the middle/senior high bus. To complicate things even further, Higley has a daughter who chose to remain at Edgewood for her junior year.

“I do the morning route and one of the other moms does the evening one,” she says of the PV runs.

“This community is awesome, everybody works together, cares about each other. Everybody finds a way,” says Coder.

The church’s hospitality facilitates this exchange.

“We just told them they were able to use it if they needed a place,” says Ray Wiser, an elder with the church and a grandparent who reluctantly accepted the task of making sure his grandchild is at the stop and picked up five days a week.

Open enrollment impacts the entire family, and there are sacrifices to be made across the board. Regina Miller of Dorset signed on for grandma taxi duty to keep her grandchildren in a rural school. Miller’s daughter, Tammy Mathews, resides in Pierpont and is a Kent State University-Ashtabula nursing student; her son-in-law works in construction outside the county. To make open enrollment work for the couple’s three school-age grandchildren, Miller drives from Dorset to the children’s home on Cain Road, packs them in her car and hauls them to the bus stop, all before 7 a.m.

“It’s quite hectic,” she says.

Complicating things are two younger children, a 3-year-old and 1-year-old, who have to be bundled up and put in car seats for the trip down Route 7. Still, she’s willing to make the sacrifice because of the perceived value of the PV system.

“It’s more family oriented, smaller,” she says.

In terms of academic performance, the districts are fairly equal. According to the state’s report cards issued last month, both are rated “effective,” with Buckeye passing on 24 indicators and PV on 21. The open enrollment parents say they were impressed with the PV facilities, especially the computer labs.



Rural thumb

The commitment of these parents was immediately recognized by Geordan as he started working with them in discussions and orientation meetings earlier this year.

“That only reassured us just how committed they would be to our district,” he says. “They’ve been a great addition.”

Each open enrollment student brings $5,700 in state foundation money. Geordan says that money helped stabilize the district in difficult financial times.

“We had (laid off) four teachers in the spring. Accepting these youngsters has allowed us to bring these teachers back,” he says. “Definitely, bringing these youngsters into the district really stabilized classroom numbers to where we are able to keep staff and assist us in maintaining the levels we want to be at in the classrooms.”

For some of the Buckeye parents, there is satisfaction in knowing they are diverting foundation money from a district that they say turned a deaf ear to the community’s pleas last winter.

“Buckeye didn’t seem to get it,” says Duane Marcy, whose 6-year-old daughter is in first-grade at PV. “They had no regard for us out here. That’s the main factor.”

His family made the decision to pursue open enrollment as soon as the board voted to close the school. Why PV rather than Jefferson or Conneaut?

“The fact that PV is a rural school district with a rural attitude and the fact Pierpont is also that,” Marcy says. “We felt PV was a much better fit for our lifestyle and the way we wanted our daughter to be brought up. Instead of what we see (with) Kingsville/Edgewood as being an area of subdivisions and $400,000 homes with a more urban attitude instead of our preferred rural lifestyle.

Marcy does not intend to be mean or judgmental in his comments, but he is stating the geographic and cultural realities of this district’s dichotomy — suburban northern communities onto which is tacked a rural southern appendage that sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. Hammered by the school board’s decision, that thumb is quite tender these days, and parents talk about the need for redistricting, for finding a new home for this slice of Americana that doesn’t fit into Buckeye’s suburban pie.

Geordan said some of the Pierpont parents have spoken to him about redistricting PV to include Pierpont, but that’s a matter for taxpayers to initiate and politicians to orchestrate, not the school board or administration to meddle with.

“It seems like they could come together with a solution,” Regina Miller says. “We need to get together here and come up with solutions.”

For now, open enrollment is the best solution on the table..

“I just think the schools of PV are more rural in nature,” says parent Sharon Mann, whose seventh-grader, Nicole, chose PV’s Middle School over Braden.

“She would be switching schools at seventh grade anyway, and I thought it would be a better fit. She seems to be happy, and everybody at PV are making the Pierpont students very welcome.”

Nicole said the decision was a dilemma because she had friends from her Pierpont sixth-grade class heading to both districts. Five of them went to PV, and Nicole followed them. She plays volleyball for her new school, which necessitates a trip to Andover for her mother after she gets off work at the Ashtabula County Treasurer’s Office. But Mann says the trip is still shorter than what she’d have to drive if Nicole had gone to Braden.

The lengthy bus rides from Pierpont to Ashtabula and Kingsville townships are often cited by parents as a major reason for sending their youngsters south.

Open-enrollment parents who have neighbors who stayed in Buckeye this year say they are seeing an extra 45 minutes tacked on to their bus-rides. Braden students have a particularly long trek; they go to Edgewood, first, where they pick up a bus for the final leg to the State Road school.

“That’s an awful long time to be on a bus,” says Bobbie Moore.

In many cases, however, the parents are purchasing shorter bus rides for their children with time out of their own busy schedules. Brenda Niemi makes four round-trip runs to the stop every day, about 32 miles total.

“But it beats having to drive them back and forth to Andover,” she says.

Moore worked out a schedule with her ex-husband, who brings the youngsters to the bus stop on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; she does the other days. Their oldest son is in seventh grade, so she has to be at the stop by 7 a.m. Her daughter, Amberlyn, a fourth-grader, makes the trip in her pajamas. After her brother is on the bus, Amberlyn and her parent return home so Amberlyn can get ready for school and be back at the stop by 8 a.m.

“I do it for the kids,” Moore says. “I just find it very hard to have them on the bus that long.”

Moore is also concerned about Buckeye’s future. In discussions last winter, it became apparent the district’s financial problems won’t be going away for a long time, and North Kingsville Elementary could be next in line to close. Moore worries the district’s academic programs and transportation services will be further eroded as personal property tax revenue vanishes and property values plummet.

Moore said one other factor that went into their decision was the $150 participation fee her son would have had to pay in order to play foodball for Edgewood. She said they also looked at Jefferson, but that would have required transporting Amberlyn to Rock Creek Elementary.

“I’m not driving to Rock Creek, that’s clear out of my way,” says Moore, who works in Andover.



Paying the price

While most of the parents are pleased with their chosen district and the arrangement it takes to get them there, there are issues.

“This is the first time they’ve left the system, and they are not doing well at all,” Regina Miller says of her grandchildren. “We’re hoping that, in time, it will change for them.

Marcy said he asked his daughter how she liked her new school after her first day, and she said she loved it. After the second day, he asked again.

“She said she liked it even better,” he says.

Marcy is self-employed, lives just up the road from the stop and enjoys having the extra time with his daughter. He hardly notices the inconvenience. Coder said adopting the new schedule has given their family more time together, and Mann says it’s forced her to get out of bed a little earlier and be ready for her job in Jefferson.

For retired grandparents who envisioned a retirement without clocks and appointments, it’s a different story.

“It changes your whole day,” Ray Wiser said as he waited for the bus to arrive.

He says their daughter made the decision to send her child to PV rather than Buckeye, but they are the ones who have to deal with the rigid schedule dictated by open enrollment.

“You got to be at a certain point every day you normally would not be at,” he says. “My daughter didn’t want her to go to Edgewood.”

“Personally, I’d like to see them get picked up at the end of the driveway,” Wiser added.

And there is another issue these parents and grandparents will eventually have to face: a parking lot full of snow.

“We haven’t sat down to discuss that,” Wiser says. “We got a (church) board meeting this month.”

“I don’t believe it will be any more of an issue for the (PV) bus to drive in here than for Buckeye’s buses to drive these roads,” Marcy says.

“That’s another thing, winter. I just keep pushing that back. I’m not thinking about it,” Regina Miller as she waited for the bus to climb the hill from the Pymatuning Creek valley.