The Rowe children and teachers will have their own classrooms, with the top floor converted into a wing for 5th- and 6th-graders.
Firefighters pour water on the blaze that destroyed the Rowe Elementary School.ROWE — Students from Rowe Elementary School, which was destroyed by fire on Aug. 4, will start school on schedule after all.
The children will be going to Hawlemont Regional Elementary School in nearby Charlemont when classes start on Wednesday.
The decision was made Thursday night at a joint meeting of the Rowe and Hawlemont School Committees, which had been deadlocked by a history of disagreements.
Things began moving forward on Wednesday, when Rowe formally withdrew a lawsuit it had previously filed against Hawlemont over a cost-sharing situation.
“We did whatever we had to do,” said Lisa Miller, chairwoman of the Rowe School Committee.
“I was incredibly pleased,” said Beth Bandy, chairwoman of the Hawlemont School Committee.
Volunteers from the schools and towns held a “work bee” to help teachers move in on Friday. Hawlemont is about 9 miles and 20 minutes away from the Rowe school.
The Rowe children and teachers will have their own classrooms, with the top floor converted into a wing for fifth- and sixth-graders. The schools’ two principals had toured the Hawlemont building in advance with maps to figure out where to place the Rowe kids.
At the joint meeting, the committees went through a memorandum of understanding “line by line,” said Bandy.
There were a couple of bumps in the road that she said were easily overcome. For example, there was a request that Rowe teachers be allowed to salvage materials from their burned-out building.
Hawlemont had learned from a flooding episode of its own last year that in such cases, the required testing of such materials for lead, asbestos and other toxins is too time-consuming to be practical.
The other sticking point was over the cost of additional services, such as having dumpsters emptied every week instead of every two weeks.
“In the end, Rowe was very generous,” said Bandy. She credits Noel Abbott, chairman of the Select Board in Rowe, for standing up and urging his town’s school committee to accept the figures proposed by Hawlemont.
By 8 p.m. Thursday, the members of the two school committees had all signed the memorandum, the children had a place to go, and the crisis was over.
“It’s been a long three weeks,” said Miller.