Bellefonte is building a new school. How will the district choose who attends?
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- Bellefonte’s superintendent proposed changing elementary school boundaries.
- The proposal would help balance class sizes across the district.
- Parents expressed concerns with the proposal and its potential impact on students.
The Bellefonte Area School District is weighing changes that could potentially affect which students get to attend its new elementary school.
A new proposal, outlined in a memo from Superintendent Roy Rakszawski, would balance class sizes by reassigning 52 students in four Bellefonte-area neighborhoods to the Pleasant Gap or Marion-Walker elementary schools starting in the 2026-27 school year. But the preliminary recommendation discussed at last week’s school board meeting is expected to be tabled, the superintendent said, after parents voiced concerns with the plan.
Many who spoke over the meeting’s nearly 90-minute public comment session criticized the district for proposing a plan that would uproot dozens of students from their existing networks of friends, teachers and support systems. Others expressed disappointment that their children may not get to attend the district’s new Bellefonte Elementary School as expected once it opens next fall.
Josh Brown, the father of two Bellefonte Elementary School students, said he was dreading the day when he might need to tell his fourth-grade son that he would move from the new school to Pleasant Gap Elementary.
“Each week, and I mean each week, we drive to the school so he can see the new school he’s going to be going to being built,” Brown said. “Since yesterday, when I found out about this, now I have to ‘hide my emotions,’ so to speak, and take my son and show him the school [he thinks] he’s still going to go to but, at some point, I’m going to have to say, ‘Nope, I’m sorry. You’re going to be going to Pleasant Gap.’”
Why move students to other schools?
In his recommendation to the board, Rakszawski said the proposed plan to adjust Bellefonte’s elementary school boundaries would help balance elementary class sizes across the district. The efforts arrive months before Bellefonte’s district prepares to close the existing Bellefonte and Benner elementary schools at the conclusion of the 2025-26 school year and make way for its newest elementary school.
The latest proposal would reassign nine students from the Logan Greene neighborhood, 15 students from the Burnham Estates neighborhood and 15 students living along Blanchard Street from Bellefonte Elementary to Pleasant Gap Elementary. Another 13 students in the Walker Meadows neighborhood would move from Marion-Walker Elementary to Pleasant Gap Elementary.
“If the district were to simply combine the current students in the current Bellefonte Elementary and Benner Elementary schools, class sizes would be somewhat uneven, leaving Pleasant Gap Elementary’s average class size smaller than the remaining schools by 3 to 4 students,” the superintendent wrote in a memo. “Adjusting elementary school boundaries to even out class size would provide more equitable learning environments to our students and best support teaching and learning for all three elementary schools.”
According to projections for the 2026-27 school year, the proposed plan would reduce the average class size at the new Bellefonte Elementary School from 19.9 students to 18.5 students. Marion-Walker Elementary’s average class size would grow from 18.2 students to 18.5 students, while Pleasant Gap Elementary would see a more sizable increase from an average of 15.5 students per class to 19.5 students per class.
The proposal would not add any “remarkable bus routes” and would shorten all but one affected bus route, which would become a tenth of a mile longer.
Parents push back on proposal
Many parents who spoke at Tuesday’s board meeting expressed concerns with the potential addition of a transition between schools before scheduled moves to Bellefonte’s middle and high schools.
Parent and psychologist Michelle Yarwood said transitions in consecutive years pose a significant challenge for young learners. Under the proposal, that would be in store for some current fourth grade students like her son, who would move to a new school for fifth grade before entering middle school.
“The first year after a school transition, students experience reduced psychological well-being, which includes internalizing symptoms such as depression, anxiety, loss of self-esteem, as well as externalizing problems like aggression, anger and disrespect for authority figures,” Yarwood said. “Academically, students are less engaged in learning, less confident about their learning and just generally less interested in their academics.”
Kayla Simpson, the mother of three students, said she moved to the area with her husband and chose to live within Bellefonte’s district because they were drawn to the tight-knit community and its schools. She suggested hasty plans to change school boundaries and modify students’ school assignments would throw a wrench into carefully crafted plans for families like hers.
Simpson said she felt discussions surrounding potential redistricting efforts were reducing students to mere numbers on a page and losing sight of their true impacts.
“Last night, my third-grader caught wind of this proposal and, within minutes, his stomach hurt, and he stopped eating,” Simpson said “He didn’t want dessert and said to my husband and I, ‘I don’t want to be pulled away from everyone that I know. I didn’t do anything wrong. How can I stop this?’”
Some parents who spoke at the meeting said proposed plans to modify school boundaries would interfere with existing after-school care for their children or separate students from their friends. Others said the impacted areas, including the Logan Greene neighborhood, are expected to continue growing in the near future, which may render boundary adjustments obsolete.
Several parents said that Pleasant Gap Elementary, the smallest of the district’s elementary schools, should receive significant renovations or even expansions if it needs to accommodate more students in future years.
“These two, three extra people in their class ... Why do we have to do that?” asked one mother who did not identify herself before the board. “You built the new school that was supposed to before those two schools. There’s no need to take some [students] and put them into Pleasant Gap when we don’t even have the room.”
What happens next?
At Tuesday’s meeting, Rakszawski recommended tabling the recommendation and pulling back to examine other options for potentially shuffling the distribution of students between its three elementary schools starting in the 2026-27 academic year.
“I would admit that without knowing all of the individual stories, I didn’t anticipate the impact that was presented tonight on individuals,” said Rakszawski. “Perhaps I should have, and I apologize for that. This is meant to be a discussion and meant to elicit public comment and input, so we appreciate that.”
Many options are on the table, the superintendent acknowledged, including abandoning redistricting efforts and moving forward with earlier plans to simply send students from the existing Bellefonte and Benner elementary schools to the new Bellefonte Elementary School. Rakszawski said the district will also explore options to establish a “phase-in” process to gradually adjust school assignments or use a process through which families could manually choose to move their children to another elementary school, similar to the Penns Valley Area School District’s open enrollment process.
Jon Guizar, the school board president, said he believes the district should examine every option available to mitigate parents’ concerns and avoid unnecessary disruptions for students.
“We really are compelled to look at every option,” Guizar said. “It’s all a very tricky proposition, let’s put it that way. We really do need to consider every option, and [the latest recommendation] was part of that.”
Board member Donna Smith said she was not comfortable supporting a plan that would affect Bellefonte-area families who are still grappling with the closures of the district’s existing Bellefonte and Benner elementary schools. She questioned whether tinkering with class sizes was worth the metaphorical cost of another substantial change for students.
“We intended that this new elementary school [would be] large and flexible, and it can accommodate these numbers of students,” Smith said. “I’m seeing small class sizes now, and I’m seeing small class sizes even without changing any boundaries.”
Guizar said he didn’t think the board was “anywhere near” being able to make a decision on potential redistricting efforts.
“I think everything we heard here tonight is on the table, in my view,” the board president said. “We’re presented with a lot of options from the board and from the community. I think they should all be considered in some fashion.”
Bellefonte’s new elementary school will span 98,000 square feet with the capacity to accommodate around 750 students between kindergarten and the fifth grade. Key features for the $55.3 million building include outdoor learning spaces, a STEM lab and a media center, plus additional room on the 107.6-acre property for future athletic fields.
This story was originally published January 26, 2026 at 5:34 AM.
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