Pottstown campaign to save local schools

Rather than see the school board in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, replace the city’s five neighborhood elementary schools with one mega-school containing 1,800 students, Tom Hylton helped launch a campaign that defeated five incumbent school board members. This year, the newly constituted board will start renovating the five existing schools, says Hylton, who runs a nonprofit called Save Our Land, Save Our Towns Inc. “We assembled a team of five candidates pledging to keep Pottstown’s neighborhood schools,” Hylton says. “The neighborhood schools team beat five incumbents with 82 percent of the vote,” he reports. Save Our Land is doing a case study of the benefits of neighborhood schools. “As the study evolves, I would like to prepare a master plan for making our schools 100 percent walkable,” Hylton says. About 75 percent of the students in Pottstown, 40 miles northwest of Philadelphia, currently walk to school. Some live as far as 1.5 miles from a school. “By reconfiguring our schools, we can place nearly all our schools within a mile, which I think is a doable distance for walkability,” Hylton says. Hylton was also the editor of a 32-page report that has been issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, other education-related organizations, and AIA Pennsylvania. Titled “Renovate or Replace: The case for restoring and reusing older school building,” the report was conceived and produced by a task force representing state agencies and nonprofit organizations, and has been sent to every school board in the state. The report includes an essay by Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Gerald Zahorchak arguing that many older schools can be renovated to 21st-century standards. Among the “points to remember” in the report: “The ‘greenest building is the one you don’t have to build. Reusing existing structures makes the most efficient use of land and conserves resources.” To download, go to www.walkable.org/download/school_reuse.pdf.