PITTSFIELD — The next few weeks are likely to decide if Morningside Community School’s 2025-26 school year will be its last.

District leaders are considering closing the school, according to a letter from interim Superintendent Latifah Phillips to the school’s families. She has scheduled three meetings this week to take input and feedback on whether the 52-year-old school on Burbank Street will close and students will be assigned to other city elementary schools where there's room.

The sessions are scheduled for 5:30 p.m., Monday, and 8:15 a.m. and 4 p.m. Thursday, both at Morningside. Student supervision will be available at the morning meeting.

Next year's Morningside fifth graders, like the rest of their city peers, are already bound for Herberg Middle School as part of the middle school restructuring project.

“I think the $4 million budget shortfall is pushing us to make changes that maybe we wouldn’t have considered in a more stable budget season,” Phillips said of the proposal.

If the proposal moves forward, it would be the district's first school closure since Pomeroy Elementary School was shuttered in 1985.

Closing a school is “not a decision to be made lightly,” Phillips said. “I would not have chosen to make such a decision. But I also recognize when faced with this kind of shortfall we have to evaluate everything ... how do we cut while maintaining the best interests of students?”

In the letter, Phillips stressed that no decision has been made on whether Morningside will close in June. She noted that should closure be recommended, a public hearing would be held for families, staff, and community members.

“We recognize that Morningside has served as a community school for many years and holds a special place for students, families, and alumni,” Phillips said in the letter. “Because of its longstanding role in the community, we are committed to carefully considering family perspectives and student needs as we explore options for the school’s future.”

The idea comes as Phillips, her cabinet and the School Committee grapple with a challenging task: Find $4 million in cuts to balance the fiscal 2027 budget while implementing a student needs-based funding formula designed to provide each school with adequate resources.

As is the case in surrounding districts, lower-than-expected increases in state funding, paired with rising fixed costs, are driving the schools' financial difficulties. And is true elsewhere, jobs are on the line: The schools are looking at a potential reduction of 21 positions.

Phillips told the School Committee at its March 11 meeting that level-funding Morningside and Conte, which are hampered by their open floor plans and have long struggled in state accountability ratings, need additional resources to provide equitable opportunities.

While “incredibly thankful for the hard-working staff in those buildings who show up,” Phillips said the two schools “cannot go into another year the way they’ve been staffed and funded this year.”

School Committee member Sarah Muil, herself a Morningside graduate, first raised the possibility at the end of the March 11 meeting. She asked if it might be wiser to close a community school rather than dedicate additional resources to improvements which, to this point, have eluded the open floor plan schools.

Conte's days are already numbered, as it is expected to be consolidated with Crosby Elementary School in a new school to be built on the Crosby campus.

On March 11, Phillips told the Committee she would look at what closing Morningside would look like — and where its students would go — and report back to the School Committee for its March 25 meeting. “That would include having conversation with staff as well as families,” she said.

Muil explained that if there’s space available to reallocate students and staff in an equitable way, “we should be looking at that. I hate to do that, Morningside was my school. But I think it’s something we need to consider.”

Days later, Muil told The Eagle her question was prompted by concern over the potential 21 layoffs the district is presently facing, “especially when we’re having a difficult time filling seats for teachers in the first place.”

“It’s more ‘Let’s look at the numbers,' and if it’s helpful, let’s start having conversations with people, if something that would make a big difference."

In interviews this past week, Phillips and Mayor Peter Marchetti — also a Morningside graduate — have addressed financial reality prompting the discussion, and how it might also address long-standing facility and educational inequities.

Marchetti, in an radio interview on WTBR-FM, said on a visit to a DARE graduation at Morningside last fall, he realized “nothing's changed. It’s the same school I went to 50 years ago.”

“It’s time to have the conversation: is it really providing the best education? And it will be tough conversation. No one wants to lose their school,” he said.

But much like the middle school restructuring, which is replacing neighborhood middle schools with city-wide Grade five to six and Grade seven and eight schools, Marchetti sees this as an opportunity to bring more city children of different backgrounds together. “The more we put Pittsfield kids together the better all of them will flourish,” he said.

Phillips echoed that sentiment, saying that the ability to evenly and fairly distribute Morningside students throughout the city’s other schools is a significant part of the decision on whether to move forward.

Conte, Crosby and Morningside were all left out of the city's seven-school building needs project of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Egremont, Stearns, Allendale, Capeless, and Williams elementary schools and both Herberg and Reid middle schools received additions and renovations in that project.