By Emily Schopfer
MIDDLETOWN – After a turbulent few months, school closures are officially on pause for the 2026-27 school year.
At a May 12 meeting, Middletown Board of Education (BOE) member Joan Minnuies proposed a motion to rescind the board’s former resolution authorizing the closures. The motion passed with a 6-2 vote, including two abstentions.
The action reverses the board’s February decision to close Leonardo and Navesink elementary schools and to convert Bayshore Middle School into a new Bayshore Elementary School for those students.
Minnuies and board members Caterina Skalaski, Mark Soporowski, Erin Torres, Sara Weinstein and Deborah Wright voted in favor of the motion to rescind. Board president Chris Aveta and member Jacqueline Tobacco abstained; board vice president Frank Capone was not present at what was described as a “voting and rehire” meeting.
The meeting, held in Middletown High School North’s library and media center, was unusually brief and calm, compared to the past few months of meetings where arguments erupted between the audience and the board and among board members.
During a tense April 28 meeting, which ran for over six hours, the BOE approved a $201 million final budget for the 2026-27 school year but failed to pass the long-range facilities plan. Minnieus cited “the board of education not adopting and approving the amendment of the long-range facilities plan” as the reason for her motion to rescind the closures.
The motion followed an April 29 letter from Aveta and Superintendent Jessica Alfone to the community, which suggested the district should postpone the closures. “We are recommending that the Middletown Township School District not implement the planned school closings and consolidations scheduled for the 2026-2027 school year,” the letter read. The change of heart, according to the letter, was also a “direct result of the Board’s failure to adopt the Long-Range Facilities Plan.”
In the not quite three months since the school closure resolution was approved, Middletown parents have expressed outrage: school board meetings ran until 1 a.m., police were present at the meetings, a public rally was held at Croydon Hall, and seven Middletown parents even filed a 206-page petition of appeal March 4 with the state Commissioner of Education.
“Community engagement works,” said Kristin Rooney, one of the parents involved in the petition. “It is clear that, year after year, board leadership has failed to execute a strategic plan that meets the needs of our district.”
“Holding leaders accountable to the oath they take and the policies they are entrusted to uphold is essential,” she said.
Rooney also sits on the Navesink Elementary School PTA and helped organize the March 15 Croydon Hall rally.
Still, Rooney said the work is not done. “Now it is time for our community, BOE and administration to come together and work on a real way forward: a plan that has a goal in mind with a well-thought-out, fiscally responsible way of getting there, crafted with transparency and through collaboration,” she said.
Rooney wants parents to know they should never stop showing up, and that the “community should feel incredibly proud of how it came together to protect our schools, our children, and the future of our town.”
Amy Doherty, the business administrator and board secretary, said at the April 28 meeting that the school’s closures and conversion would save the district approximately $3 million ($3.783 million according to the board’s own restructuring proposal sent to parents Feb. 21). The closures, along with the layoffs of 40 staff members (three in administration, 25 in instructional staff, and 12 in support roles), was factored into the approved $201.5 million budget for 2026-27, according to the budget presentation.
When asked how the revocation of the closures would affect the approved budget and layoffs, Doherty said, “The preliminary plan includes the reallocation of funds that were intended to replenish our maintenance reserve, removal of capital items related to the conversion of Bayshore Middle School to an elementary school, and reduction in personnel to be achieved by not hiring for positions currently vacant.”
The article originally appeared in the May 21 – 27, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.
