By Linda Conner Lambeck

WESTPORT — Parents showed up in force at Monday’s Board of Education meeting to urge the panel to stick with its plan to provide modular classrooms to the overcrowded Long Lots Elementary School next year.

The parents also  discouraged any short-term redistricting by school officials.

“Put out the fire before you redecorate,” Kate Sloan, parent of a first grader and two future Long Lots students, told the school board.

Sloan said although she wholeheartedly supports a thoughtful and deliberate long-term plan for redistricting, in the short term Long Lots is overcrowded and needs modulars this fall.

Neither Long Lots or redistricting was on Monday’s agenda.

An attempt to add a redistricting discussion to the agenda by Republican board member Robert Harrington failed with only three of seven members in support. It would have taken a two-thirds vote in the affirmative to add the issue.

Instead, the board voted unanimously to start what they called a “high level” discussion on redistricting at the board’s Jan. 23 meeting.

“It took some effort … and multiple votes but we finally got a redistricting discussion onto the agenda,” Harrington said after the meeting.

Harrington, along with Vice Chairwoman Liz Heyer and member Dorie Hordon, also Republicans, have said they don’t think portable classrooms will fix the problem. Enrollment is expected to increase before Long Lots can be rebuilt or replaced.

“This is not about the money, it’s about providing a solution that will be outgrown in just one year, while at the other side of town there are multiple classroom free,” Harrington said.

 On Jan. 3, the school board voted 4 to 3 to support installation of two modular classrooms at Long Lots. 

The next day, however, the Board of Finance voted unanimously to table the $600,000 request so that other possible solutions to resolve overcrowding at the school — such as moving some Long Lots students to other schools — could be reviewed. The finance panel plans to review the request in February.

The Planning and Zoning Commission, meanwhile, voted Monday to approve the installation of the modulars.

Parents who spoke at Monday’s school board meeting, including both co-presidents of the PTA, urged the board to think about children and not the bottom line.

“If [redistricting is] what you feel needs to be prioritized now to relieve overcrowding at Long Lots please take the time to do it right and thoughtfully and least disruptively to our children who have already been through so much,” said Julie Gartin, parent of a fourth grader, a first grader and 3-year-old. “These kids aren’t numbers on a spread sheet to be moved from school to school, from year to year depending on building open seats.”

Both Supt. of Schools Thomas Scarice and Long Lots Principal Kim Ambrosio told the board last week that redistricting by autumn is not advisable.

Gartin said she wished the board had unanimously listened to administrators. She said a quick redistricting would be irresponsible.

Parent Rebecca Zipkin presented a letter she said was signed by 160 Long Lots parents in support of adding the modular classrooms.

Kim Kane, another parent, said investing in modulars while a long-term solution is developed would give students the consistency they need, especially coming out of a pandemic.

Bia Hittman, who has two children at Long Lots, said the school is overcrowded and in desperate need of immediate relief. She called it unfair to suggest that certain programs at Long Lots, such as intensive resource classrooms for special education students, be moved to other schools.

“That would be catastrophic for them and the staff,” Hittman said.

Parent Sarah Morrison said she supports modular classrooms, adding that time is of the essence.

“We need a solution even if it’s temporary and we need it now,” Morrison said.

Heyer, who asked about the intensive resource classes a week earlier, said she wanted everyone in the community to understand she’s gotten their emails and phone calls, and takes all the comments very seriously.

“They don’t fall on deaf ears,” Heyer said, who initially supported a board discussion on redistricting that evening.

Harrington said he appreciated all the parents who wrote and spoke to the board.

“I feel bad, as for multiple years, this overcrowding and over population at Long Lots has been building up with zero policy action from the school board,” he said.

Freelance writer Linda Conner Lambeck, a reporter for more than four decades at the Connecticut Post and other Hearst publications, is a member of the Education Writers Association.