PITTSFIELD — As the school year enters its final weeks, planning for the future is coming into sharper focus for current Morningside Community School students and the district’s first year of citywide middle schools.

Morningside Community School parents should know by the end of the month where their children will be attending school next year, interim Superintendent Latifah Phillips told the School Committee on Wednesday night.

The 52-year-old school on Burbank Street is closing at the end of the school year. Its students will attend Allendale, Capeless, Egremont or Williams this fall.

The School Committee voted to close Morningside Community School last month, citing the teaching and learning hurdles posed by the building’s open floor plan.

The district is also working to complete new teaching assignments for Morningside staff and elementary and middle school teachers who will move to Herberg and Reid to accommodate the new middle school structure.

Meanwhile, the schools have reached out to parents with new start and end times for next year and shared plans for moving-up ceremonies for fourth- and fifth-grade elementary students, Phillips said. Student visits to Herberg, which will educate all city fifth and sixth-grade students, and Reid, where seventh and eighth graders will learn, are being scheduled.

The School Committee voted to close Morningside last month, citing the teaching and learning hurdles posed by the building’s open floor plan. The district’s plan is to help Morningside students improve their academic performance by sending them to schools with traditional classrooms and providing extra support.

The district initially proposed an infusion of resources into Morningside and Conte to turn around years of low accountability scores. Conte will be getting that infusion, but is expected to close when a new elementary school is built on the Crosby campus.

In her update on the Morningside plans, Phillips said redistricting consultants working with the schools are completing the work of drawing new districts. Public meetings will be held on those districts later this month, a formal public hearing will be held, and the School Committee will be asked at its May 27 meeting to approve new districts.

The consultants have made recommendations based on physical boundaries and a desire to keep existing groups of students together, Phillips said.

“But it'll be really important for us to get feedback from families, because we don't know what we don't know until families see the plan and give us some feedback," she said.

To that end, Morningside families are invited to attend one of three meetings: From 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 19, and two on Wednesday, May 20, from 8-9 a.m. and from 6:30-7:30 p.m. All three meetings are at the school.

Community members attend a Pittsfield School Committee public hearing on the closing of Morningside Community School on April 9 at the Reid Middle School Library. The district will hold three more meetings for feedback — one on Tuesday and two on Wednesday.

Once the committee has approved the new districts, Morningside families with students entering kindergarten through fourth grade this fall will know which school they'll be attending.

Phillips is also asking the committee to review the district walker and rider policy, which determines which families are eligible for bus transportation, and the intra-district school choice policy, which has allowed families to send students to elementary and middle schools outside their geographic enrollment zone.

Phillips said she’d like to revisit the walker and rider policy to make sure that families who need transportation to and from school are afforded that opportunity.

“It's really important to us that our students can get to school, and that's our commitment, that we're going to get students to school,” she said.

As for the pause on intra-district transfers: In reply to a question from School Committee member Ciara Batory about when the pause would end, Phillips said that would happen once the district knows how many seats are available at Allendale, Capeless, Egremont and Williams.

Crosby and Stearns elementary schools have no pause and have seats available, Phillips said. But Conte will not accept inbound transfers, in order to manage class sizes given the building’s open floor plan.

Phillips said she’d like to discuss the possibility of implementing a lottery system for intra-district choice, with siblings of students already enrolled at an out-of-district school and students from consistently underperforming schools given priority.