Muncie Community Schools board votes to close Southside High School

School board members in Muncie voted Monday night to close Southside High School and combine all city high school students into one building.

“ The vote is 4 to 1 on this board, so the vote stands.”

 Muncie will become a city with only one high school for the first time in more than 50 years.

Beginning next school year, all high school students will combine into the Central High School building and Southside will become a middle school for grades 6-8.

Muncie Community Schools Superintendent Tim Heller told the public that the Central High School building was the only building large enough to house all of grades 9-12 in the city.

“Merging the high schools will provide more educational opportunities for all students and allow the creation of new programming, such as early college and International Baccalaureate programs.”

Board chairperson Bev Kelley was the only board member who voted no to closing Southside.  She was also the only one who took the chance to speak from the board table.

“It never was to me about the two schools.  It was all about cost containment.  And I felt in my heart that there were other things that we could have done, uh, under cost containment to save money besides doing these two schools, and I… and I, um, and I still feel that way.”

Kelley became emotional as she was given a standing ovation from a crowd wearing Southside red apparel.  She said she believes the city has too many high school students to put them all into one building.

Other board members were heckled when they chose not to give their reason for voting.

“No one else has anything else to say?  Wow…”

After the vote, school administrators and board members – except for Kelley – left the gymnasium of the Muncie Area Career Center without talking to the public.

Melody Stader says the community knew that the board would close Southside.  She is a US History teacher at Southside and has a daughter who is a Southside junior.

“I think she’s going to be okay and she’s pretty positive about… I mean, she’s sad about losing her school.  But we’ve tried to be very positive and talk about, you know, it’s a transition, you’ll be a trailblazer, you’ll be a senior going in, you need to show other students how to do it.  I’ve tried to talk to all my juniors, cause I only teach juniors, I’ve tried to talk to all of them that way.  That there are positives that come out of this.  It’s a sad day, we need to grieve, but when someone dies – and that’s what this is like – you don’t just stop, you have to move on and you have to figure out a way to get past it.  You know, it’s going to be hard to put on purple, but if that’s what I have to do, I’m going to put on purple next year.”

Marisa Beaty was the valedictorian of the Southside class of 2008.  She thinks the identities of both high schools should be given up for something new.

“I think this is a perfect opportunity to bring the city together to form cohesion, to make this a positive thing.  To have a campaign where citizens, kids from the school can make up a new mascot, a new school song.  We have a lot of really talented students who are completely capable of doing that and I think that we should start fresh – a new name, a new mascot, a new song, um, even new colors.”

Heller says Wilson Middle School will be emptied and classified as “unavailable” until the year 2016, when the district will think about repurposing or selling the building.

Heller also said that the district will not sell the Anthony Administration Building as talked about in town hall meetings this fall.  He says it would cost too much to move the administration into other buildings.