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The Tribune's coverage of February–April 2023; the federal intervention filing quoting its 17 April 2023 report; American School & University, July 2023
The closure came out of the corporation's Facilities Master Plan (consultants HPM and Fanning Howey): scenarios presented 6 February 2023, final recommendations on 20 March 2023 — presented at Clay itself — and the deciding vote on 17 April 2023. The rationale was arithmetic: a district at some 70% building utilization, and Clay at 628 students against a 1,500 capacity, with $16.2 million the consultants said keeping the building open would cost over five years. The board adopted the plan and closed Clay effective at the end of 2023–24 by four votes to three, and the names print as the record gives them — for: Stephanie Ball, Kate Lee, Leslie Wesley, John Anella; against: Stuart Greene, Jeanette McCullough, Mark Costello. (Roseland's own trustee, Greene of District 5, voted to keep the town's school; he and McCullough then joined the Save Clay litigation below.) Warren Elementary closed in the same plan, in the summer of 2024. The vote this section prints is the April vote, on the contemporaneous record; a second, December 2023 vote on the building — real, but about the building's use rather than the school's life — belongs to the afterlife article, where the courts fought over exactly that distinction.