In the nearly two decades she’s lived in Warner, Anastasia Glavas has had two children go through Simonds Elementary School.
So, Glavas understood the outpouring of concern from parents and community members when the Kearsarge Regional School Board recommended the closure of Simonds and Sutton Central Elementary School. More than that, she shared it.
At a school board meeting on Thursday, she said she believes the decision was “rushed” and urged the board to present concrete numbers demonstrating the cost savings expected from the closures.
“There’s history, there’s nostalgia, there’s community,” Glavas said. “It’s also a very historical building, so the emotions are running high for sure.”
Others had similar concerns, asking the school board to provide figures modelling the impact of the closures, and what would happen if the schools were to stay open.
Conversation around closing Simonds didn’t start this month. In late 2024, some Warner residents banded together to defeat a citizens’ petition that aimed to enforce a tax cap on the school district’s budget. A similar group, Save Kearsarge Schools, has formed in recent weeks.
“There’s been talk of different consolidation options for a long time, but I think the actual decisions to do the two-school system and to move towards closing Simonds and Sutton, that is very, very sudden,” said Warner resident Ian Rogers, a member of Save Kearsarge Schools.
Rogers said he expects the board to present an “ironclad plan” laying out actual cost savings to justify the closures.
The district plans to move towards a “two-school elementary configuration,” superintendent Michael Bessette told parents in an announcement last week. If the closures were to move forward, children at Simonds would move to Kearsarge Regional Elementary School in Bradford, and Sutton Central students would go school in New London.
Beth Fenner-Lukaitis, of Warner, is a driver for the school district and said she already has children whose commute to school takes 45 minutes.
Directing Simonds students to Bradford, she said, would lengthen these morning rides and strain the already short-staffed transportation team.
“I just really beseech you to look at the impact that it’s going to have on transportation, […] the ability to do this without kids having an hour and a half ride,” she said at Thursday’s meeting.
The school board asked principals during their budget presentations about trends they have noticed in the last year. Simonds principal Tim Stokes said the future of the school has been weighing on many staff members’ minds.
“The trend at Simonds 100% all day every day is about the future of the building, the future of the town, the questions that are there,” he said. “It’s on everybody’s mind all day, every day, and it’s a topic that — it’s difficult to navigate for everyone.”
Later, the board discussed evaluating several options ranging from both schools’ closures to no closures, with cost estimates prepared ahead of the district’s Sept. 24 budget presentation.
A town vote will decide whether to close the schools, and a successful citizen petition advocating for one or both closures could also accelerate the process.
Rogers said that, either way, he hopes stakeholders can be more involved in the process going forward than they have been so far.
“What’s Warner going to look like in 2050 without an elementary school? And would that be a burden for Warner to not have that?” he said. “I think just having more conversations with communities, Warner and Sutton, but really all seven communities, in a very open way that isn’t just a three-minute public comment — I think that’s what people really, really want right now.”
