A plan months in the making became official Wednesday night when the Jim Thorpe Area School District board of directors voted 8-0 to approve the creation of a new life skills classroom for grades four through six at L.B. Morris Elementary School, a move that officials say will bring seven students back from outside placements and save the district more than $400,000 annually.

The vote caps a push that Superintendent Robert Presley first laid out publicly at a January workshop, where he argued the district was paying a steep price to educate students in Intermediate Unit programs when it could serve them in-house.

“Those IU classrooms cost us $57,500 per student, and that’s not including any of the related services like speech and occupational therapy,” Presley told the board in January. “The students really should be in our classroom, because we have better control over it.”

Wednesday’s approval transformed that proposal into reality.

“After this class, we’ll just be missing seventh and eighth grade,” Presley told the board. “The creation of this class allows us to add to our continuum of life skills from K to 12.”

The cost of out-of-district placements had been a recurring concern, with the district also paying approximately $207 per hour for the Intermediate Unit to provide speech services to students in IU programs inside Jim Thorpe’s own school buildings, while district speech pathologists could provide the same services for roughly $80 per hour.

Still, Presley framed the decision as more than a budget calculation.

“Beyond the cost, this allows us to bring students back to where they belong; in their least restrictive environment, being educated with their peers in their home district,” he said.

With the classroom approved, the board also voted to advertise for an elementary life skills teacher to staff it, one of several open positions the district will look to fill heading into the 2026-27 school year.