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GORDON DANIELS

Marks Meadow Elementary School, North Pleasant Street, Amherst, foreground, with the UMass campus in the background.

AMHERST - The proposal to close Mark's Meadow Elementary School and send its 194 students elsewhere, which the School Committee plans to vote on tonight, has a new financial twist.

The committee is asking the University of Massachusetts, which owns the building, to continue to make it available to the school district, or to reimburse the town for the cost of educating the Mark's Meadow children who live in tax-exempt UMass housing.

Closing Mark's Meadow in the fall of 2010 would save the school district an estimated $673,000 a year. A motion before the Amherst School Committee in March to close Mark's Meadow was revised Monday and is now contingent on UMass agreeing to one of these options.

Tonight's School Committee meeting will start at 7 p.m. in the high school library, with the Mark's Meadow motion the first item on the agenda. Committee members will debate it and vote, and there will be an opportunity for public comment afterward, said Andrew Churchill, the committee chairman.

"The agreement between the university and the schools involves Mark's Meadow and negotiations on how that would change haven't been completed," he said. "It seems like an important point to clarify before we say we're going to vacate the school."

Town officials have made the point in the past that about 50 children a year attend the town's elementary schools while living in UMass housing that's exempt from local property taxes. An annual payment in lieu of taxes to cover these costs to Amherst would be between $675,000 and $725,000.

UMass has responded to this argument by pointing out that it makes Mark's Meadow available to the town at no cost, Churchill said. UMass officials declined to comment for this story.

If UMass allowed the school district to continue using the building, the two alternative high school programs in South Amherst and East Amherst might move there, said School Committee member Catherine Sanderson. Students in these programs have had difficulty fitting in at the high school.

"This would be an ideal solution," Sanderson said. "It would be better for those kids to be in one building rather than two, and it would be wonderful to have it on a college campus so they could see the university as their future."

If a regionalized kindergarten through grade 12 district decided to include the sixth grade in the Regional Middle School, it could accommodate the extra students by moving the superintendent's office, and those of other administrators, to one of those vacated buildings, she said.

"This is an opportunity for the university to collaborate with our schools," Sanderson said. UMass could facilitate its recruiting of faculty and graduate students by having strong elementary schools with small class sizes, she said.

There are 1,327 children in Amherst's four elementary schools, down from about 1,800 just 15 years ago. Mark's Meadow is the smallest school.

While the School Committee estimates the annual savings from closing Mark's Meadow at $673,000, the first-year savings would be $125,000 lower because of moving expenses.

These savings would not have an impact on the debate over the budget for the fiscal year starting July 1, because they would take place in the following year. But Mark's Meadow could still be an issue, said Churchill.

"We have this structural gap, with costs rising faster than our revenues, and to put a stake in the ground to make a structural change to reduce our costs in the future might give the town more confidence in using reserves to get us through next year," he said.

The children attending Mark's Meadow could be accommodated at the other elementary schools, according to proponents of the closure plan. A redrawing of the geographical lines showing which children go to which schools could help equalize the percentage receiving free or reduced-price lunches, proponents say.

But parents of Mark's Meadow students have spoke out in defense of saving the school at a series of forums on the issue.

They have maintained that Amherst needs a plan to deal with future growth, and any new school would cost millions of dollars. They have said that closing Mark's Meadow would fill only about a quarter of the shortfall in the elementary budget for next year, and that the small class sizes offered at Mark's Meadow result in more successful students.