Meg and I and our three kids lived in Saranac Lake, next to St. Joes, from 1983 to 2015, some 32 years. We were forced out as I was unable to support Meg as her illness took its toll.

Our kids went through our local school from first grade to graduation from high school. I loved our village and its schools. I was on the committee that recommended closure to the Board of Education of the Lake Clear School in 2008. I was also on a subsequent committee that recommended Diane Fox to the Board of Education as the preferred candidate.

And now a new committee on building use has taken place, nearly 20 years later. But the problem of declining enrollment is greater than you might think. It is wrapped up and perhaps congruent with the declining population. Let me illustrate.

Here are the U.S. decennial census counts for the village of Saranac Lake for every decade since 1940:

¯1940: 7,138

¯1950: 6,913

¯1960: 6,421

¯1970: 6,086

¯1980: 5,578

¯1990: 5,377

¯2000: 5,041

¯2010: 5,406

¯2020: 4,887

Here are the percentage changes in Saranac Lake’s population by decade (village totals):

¯1940 1950: 3.15%

¯1950 1960: 7.12%

¯1960 1970: 5.22%

¯1970 1980: 8.35%

¯1980 1990: 3.60%

¯1990 2000: 6.25%

¯2000 2010: 7.24% (the only increase in this span)

¯2010 2020: 9.60%

The overall decline is clear, with only a brief uptick in 2010 before the sharpest drop in 2020.

The census of the Saranac Lake School District has not dramatically improved since the closure of the Lake Clear School. It has continued to trend in a slow downward process and now, for the first time since WWII, below a thousand. Lake Clear was built as a result of the Baby Boom, Boomers, post WWII. The Boomers were followed by the Echo, my kids. Ross Vinograd graduated from HS in 1999, and it has been downhill since.

One of the clinchers of the Lake Clear school report was the declining population of women of childbearing age in Franklin County. After all, without women, regardless of any other variable, there will be no children sitting at desks.

According to a recent Enterprise article, Bloomingdale’s school census is slowly being rerouted. Lake Clear has closed, Colby has closed and Bloomingdale will close; it’s only a matter of time. Unfortunately, that will eventually mean that you will have a village with less and less children. I cannot imagine living in a town without seeing lots of children; it is almost inconceivable.

In any case you have time to change course if both the town and the village understand the problem and have the “political will” to change direction.

Young families don’t purposefully move into municipalities that have declining schools. Nor do they move in without hope of employment. These are existing suggestions that might be reconsidered.

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Combining school districts

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This was tried twice before. One of the reasons was that Lake Placid did not want to give up its football team. As the Saranac Lake School District continues to look at increasing salaries, the costs of health insurance and the cost of maintaining an aging infrastructure, matters are only going to escalate.

Petrova is now 100 years old

Unless New York State rules have altered, the state will pay for the bulk of property and new construction. This will combine staff as well as the possibility of new types of courses being offered. The costs of maintaining old infrastructure will drop out. Back office staff can be combined and when people retire, that position will not be backfilled. Over time, this will realign staffing with no one losing jobs.

Petrova and Bloomingdale can be repurposed as rentals, condos, etc. It has already been done downstate, for example, in New Rochelle.

It is possible.

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The failure of the Great Experiment

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Brian Mann wrote an editorial in the Enterprise more than a decade ago. The Great Experiment was whether people could live and prosper in a pristine environment. As Brian explained, the woods, the air, the lakes and the animals had prospered, but people were leaving because they could not find employment. The Adirondack Park Agency had legally set and defended its rules with great efficacy, but those rules prohibited most growth and stopped the building of roads that would move produce in and out of the Park.

This is a hard nut to crack. But without some mitigation, the result will be like all National Parks with only Rangers living inside the boundaries. The current argument is that all rural counties across the U.S. have seen similar decreases in population as we continue to urbanize.

But this situation is self-imposed. The rules/laws/statutes can be changed to rebalance the contending needs of all stakeholders, including you the people who live inside the park.

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Summary

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In 1965, when the federal government closed the VA hospital in Tupper Lake, the village and town mounted a coordinated attack on the problem, as the VA was the lifeblood of the village. There were no innocent bystanders. The Town Fathers knew what was on the table.

I bet that Saranac Lake did a similar approach in the 1950s with the impending closure and sale of the Trudeau Sanatorium. But that closure was due to the invention of antibiotics. There was no easy remedy. But that created a void in Saranac Lake, which has taken decades to fill.

I am not sure that a well-regulated governmental approach to this is what you are looking for. This strikes me as a five-alarm fire that needs heavy leadership from all institutions that the village of Saranac Lake and town of Harrietstown can muster.

This problem is not going to go away; in fact, it is slowly whittling away the very heart of Adirondack living. People are leaving, money is leaving. It is costing your tax base. A tipping point is inevitable without some concerted action by the Saranac Lake School District and the town and village, with a great deal of political will.

But it is possible.

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Jon Vinograd is a former resident of Saranac Lake who now resides in Worcester, MA.