Enrollment up rise in Shale area schools

School districts in Marcellus Shale drilling hot spots are seeing student enrollment increase for the first time in years, and education advocates are calling for tax law changes to help offset the associated costs.

Superintendent Ray Fleming recently shared his thoughts on how natural gas drilling has affected Wyalusing Area School District in Bradford County during a conference call with Pennsylvania School Boards Association officials and the media.

“The student enrollments in Bradford County schools have been declining almost across the board until last year. In the 2009-2010 school year, we received 57 new students (at Wyalusing Area) and the majority of those students were associated with the gas industry,” Fleming said.

“That doesn’t seem like much, but it was a major impact on our school district because we were expecting a little further decline again. We had to hire additional teachers and had to do a few other things to get that working,” he said.

Bradford County saw 113 natural gas wells drilled into the Marcellus Shale in 2009, and another 242 drilled this year just between January and August, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection. Fleming’s was one of the first districts to face the impacts of shale development in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

“Only seven are directly related to the gas industry, but I think people are coming here because they know there are going to be jobs, whether gas-related or not. We’ve seen a lot of restaurants open up, for instance. There are rumors there’s going to be a Super Walmart,” he said.

Wyalusing Area has hired three new teachers, six or seven aides and a custodian to accommodate the enrollment increase. Still, average class size has increased by two to three students, he said.

“And another thing that has occurred here is that the employment market has disappeared,” Fleming said. “Anybody who wants a job in this county can get it as long as they want to work. But we can’t get substitute custodians, we can’t get substitute anything right now – cafeteria workers, secretaries, things of that nature – because they’re being picked up by the gas industry and they pay better than we can, so it’s having an impact that way too.”

Fleming said enrollment would have been higher last year if it wasn’t for a lack of available housing.

“Everything was bought up or rented up … but they came anyway. We had families living in pop-up campers. … We had to consider them homeless, basically. We never had a homeless student before in our district, but we had them last year. They didn’t stay; they were here until November and realized the pop-up camper wasn’t going to work all winter here,” he said.

Road closings hurt

A larger student enrollment wasn’t the only problem the district faced. Ten roads in the district were closed for a little over a week in the spring.

“Those 10 roads were critical to getting at least 27 kids to school. We couldn’t get 27 kids to school, their parents couldn’t get to work and the roads were completely trashed. I called and tried to do everything I could and frankly nothing happened until I threatened to contact the newspaper and get something on the front page of the local papers,” Fleming said.

After the threat, an official from Chesapeake Energy in Oklahoma contacted Fleming and promised to immediately get to work on repairing the roads, Fleming said.

“They came through with that. They put grader operators 24/7 on each of those 10 roads (and all but one) have been repaired,” Fleming said.

“I moved here for a reason back in 1978 … because of the Endless Mountains. It was peaceful and quiet and a very serene atmosphere. Right now, it’s a nightmare getting from one place to another. It’s not unusual for it to take an hour to get from Wyalusing to the traffic light in Towanda, 18 miles. It used to take 18 minutes,” Fleming said.

A 40-mile trip to Canton typically took 45 to 50 minutes, but that wasn’t the case on a recent drive

“Twenty-two water trucks, a rig truck, a storage tank truck and some other vehicles associated with the gas industry impeded my progress. We were going 15, 20 mph in a parade of 15, 20 vehicles and it took me almost an hour and 20 minutes to get there,” Fleming said.

District gets bonuses

Although the drilling industry has caused the school district some problems, Wyalusing Area received about $400,000 in bonus payments and should see a windfall from gas royalties on the 75 acres of district it leased to Chesapeake. But that doesn’t help the district deal with problems in the short run, Fleming said.

“We’ll have royalties coming in at some point but we don’t know when that’s going to be. We have maybe 15, 20 wells in our district right now, but they expect to have 2,600 pads in Bradford County within the next two years and I don’t think they’re up to 700 or 800 yet. So it’s going top get a lot worse before it gets better as far as the impact is concerned,” he said.

Tim Allwein, assistant executive director for the school boards association, said the association wants to ensure that school districts get a share of local revenue from any severance tax the state Legislature imposes on the industry to help the districts cover costs and relieve some burden from taxpayers.

“In addition, we also are seeking a provision in the bill that would require the state to use a portion of their revenue on the pension issue to help reduce the burden on school districts,” he said.

Speaking on behalf of rural school districts, Brian Griffith, superintendent of the Penn Valley Area School District in Centre County, said rural districts that are small in enrollment but large in geography are even more harshly affected by enrollment increases.

“My position is that a rural school district should have the ability to levy the appropriate taxes for the real estate that is contained within the boundaries of that school district. We shouldn’t be limited in our ability to do that,” Griffith said.

Allwein said many are advocating for the restoration of the ability of school districts, counties and municipalities to levy a property tax on the mineral rights for natural gas that was taken away by the Supreme Court in 2002 after nearly 100 years that the governments and districts had been levying such taxes.

“There is legislation by Bill DeWeese in the House, House Bill 10, that would restore those rights to school districts,” he said.

Allwein said it’s ironic that 207 of the 250 poorest school districts in the state are in the Marcellus Shale region.

No reported problems

Locally, superintendents for the school districts in which Marcellus shale drilling or well pad preparation has begun say no ill effects associated with the activities have impacted the district other than some traffic congestion.

Encana Oil & Gas is drilling a well in Fairmount Township near Ricketts Glen State Park and is preparing a well pad in Lake Township.

Nancy Tkatch, superintendent of Northwest Area School District, which covers Fairmount Township, said district officials have been in “active discussions” with Encana about enrollment.

Tkatch said Encana isn’t projecting any increase in enrollment for about 12 to 15 months “when more permanent employees are here.” And that would only happen if Encana’s two exploratory wells are productive.

“Our enrollment is stable enough that we would be able to accept those additional students with no significant impact on the district,” she said.

Jim McGovern, superintendent in Lake-Lehman School District, said he has not seen any drilling-related enrollment increase, and he doesn’t expect to see any in the near future based on his talks with Encana officials.

McGovern said officials are anticipating enrollment changes in the same way as when the Diocese of Scranton began consolidating Catholic schools and aren’t worried.

“We have the ability to grow within the district. … Our biggest concern would be the addition of personnel,” McGovern said.

Residents may be transient

Fleming said it’s hard to predict the issues a school district might experience and deal with them in the best possible ways. He said normally, growth in a school district is considered a good thing.

“It’s good news if you can plan for it. Typically when you get an increase in population it’s because people are moving into your district who are going to be there permanently and they’re improving their properties,” Fleming said.

“The people who are coming are transient. Three or four of the people I talked to, families that were connected to the gas industry, it’s the fifth school their kids have been in in two years, and I’m thinking, wow, you know? How do we get a handle on that?” Fleming said.