Gardner-Edgerton scrambles to help kids kicked out of apartments finish school year
With two-and-a-half weeks left of school, the Gardner-Edgerton School District is trying to find ways to help students who were forced to leave their homes after the city condemned a 200-unit apartment complex.
“We have an estimated 80 students that have an Aspen Place address that were impacted by this,” said Melissa McIntire, the director of student services at Gardner Edgerton Schools.
On Tuesday morning, the city of Gardner declared Aspen Place Apartments (101 Aspen St.) unfit for habitation because of the property’s water infrastructure that’s “severely deteriorated over time.”
The system became increasingly unreliable with frequent pipe ruptures and inconsistent water services, including not enough water flow for fire suppression — severely limiting emergency services’ ability to respond to fires or other emergencies in the area, according to a statement the city sent out on Tuesday.
Mayor Todd Winters said in a post on Citizens for the Future of Gardner public Facebook group, that the city had been on site multiple times and issued citations, but they were never addressed.
“As a result of this, we have no choice but to condemn the properties until such time as the issues can be resolved,” Winters said in the post.
Now, these students have scattered throughout the district’s boundaries and beyond.
“It’s similar to a natural disaster where several people all at once have nowhere to live … This is just a very different experience,” McIntire said.
The students displaced from their homes at Aspen Place qualify for McKinney Vento, a federal law that ensures educational rights and protections for children and youth experiencing homelessness, McIntire said. They are eligible for their fees to be waived and to receive transportation assistance to get to and from school, among other resources.
“We’ve not met and talked with every single student to talk about eligibility, but we are working on meeting with the families and how to best help them,” she said.
If families find it hard to attend the next few weeks of school, the students could be excused from attending, and their grades would see no penalty for missing class, McIntire said. But the district found that most of the students wanted to continue attending school.
“This is just an extraordinary amount of McKinney Vento students all at once, it’s unprecedented,” McIntire said.
The bus company that contracts with Gardner Edgerton has been willing to help put students on a new bus route if possible, but the challenge is if small pockets of students are scattered throughout the county. In those cases, the district is looking at partnering with a transportation company or having district employees use school vehicles to conduct student pick-ups and drop-offs.
“We’re looking into all of those options. The thing about this event is we have 80 kids… We have to meet with every single family (and) talk to them,” she said. “Every single one has a story and right now they might not have an address.”
With many families still looking for new homes and unsure where they’ll land by next school year, the district will for now keep them in the system as if they are returning in the fall for the 2025-26 school year.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all, it’s individual needs that we need to meet,” McIntire said.
This story was originally published May 8, 2025 at 4:46 PM.
