The 2020-2021  incoming kindergarten class at Dublin Consolidated School will be the last class to have the availability of fifth grade at DCS. The School Board approved the measure unanimously at Tuesday night’s meeting, after hearing several members of the public encourage them to consider a phaseout plan drafted by Dublin representative Alan Edelkind.

School Board member Richard Dunning said he saw the proposal as a “great answer to address an ongoing issue, in a way that’s fair to all.” He also said he saw it as a good model for future similar issues. 

Erin Nolan was one parent who advocated for the board adopting the phaseout.

“I wish they would just continue to offer it and [have] it not be something that people want to get rid of,” she said, “but we realized it was going to come to a head and it was stacked against us.”

She thought the approved compromise was the best solution, and certainly better than ending the fifth-grade option outright. Because of the measure, her youngest child, who enters kindergarten next year, will have the option of fifth grade at DCS.

“They haven’t proven that it costs any more or less money to operate at Dublin,” she said, but acknowledged school board members’ interest in standardizing elementary and middle schools throughout the district.

The Board approved the plan presented by Edelkind after some deliberation and minor word changes. It said that fifth grade would be provided at DCS until the 2025-26 school year, unless there is a change in the Articles of Agreement that changes the structure of educational services. The approved measure also specified that if, in any year prior to the 2025-2026 year, there are less than four students set to enroll at DCS, all fifth graders will attend South Meadow School in Peterborough that year. If three years in a row go by without DCS able to populate a fifth grade class, all fifth graders will go to SMS from that point on. 

Nolan and speaker Karen Niemela emphasized their motivation was not to retain numbers at DCS in order to keep it open, but to offer the chance for more students to benefit from the intimate class sizes at DCS.

“Dublin is so small it’s like a public-private school,” Nolan said.

She believed that the additional year with a small class was essential to her daughter’s ability to thrive at SMS as a sixth grader. Niemela described the DCS fifth grade experience as a “lovely little bubble some of us want to raise our kids in.”