Oneida City School District officials are moving ahead with plans to hold high school classes in a recently closed parochial school in Onondaga County.
Extensive flooding from a June storm damaged the district’s high school to the point that officials had to find a new location for more than 600 students and staff when school starts in September. Superintendent Matthew Carpenter says the district is pursuing a lease to use the vacant Bishop Grimes campus in East Syracuse.
“We don't have that lease in hand yet,” said Carpenter. “We're working on it. It's right now between the Syracuse diocese attorneys and our attorneys. We're confident that that's going to get done.”
The other option, Carpenter said, would have kept high school students in Oneida, and attending Oneida’s middle school. Middle school students would attend classes in the morning, with high school students attending during the afternoon. But Carpenter said using Bishiop Grimes was the best option.
“Very similar size to our current high school,” he said. “It has about 40 classroom spaces. It has a nice cafeteria area, it has science labs, it has a nice varsity size gym. It has art rooms. You know, there's some spaces that are very similar to ours. So that's why I think it felt like a good fit.”
In the meantime, the district is answering questions about how students from Oneida will get to and fare in a school building a county away. The biggest questions Carpenter gets are about transportation. He said school buses will transport all students to the East Syracuse school via the New York State Thruway.
As far as retrofitting the vacant school to fit Oneida’s needs, Carpenter says they’re working on it.
“Their last graduating class was June,” he said. “So if you walk in now, it looks like high school, feels like high school. But we are right now assessing furniture, right? Anything like that that we need we're looking at.”
As for Oneida High School, which suffered massive damage to classrooms and the buildings electrical systems, Carpenter figures it’ll be a year before students start walking those halls again. His biggest challenge in all of this?
“We've got to make the best decision we can, out of a group of not so great decisions, not so great opportunities, and we're not going to make everyone happy,” Carpenter said. “And we've got to do the best we can to provide instruction for our nearly 500 kids and try to keep the school day as close to normal as possible.”
