Mansfield to move state preschool to Robinson; staff day care Little Hornets to close

Superintendent Murphy on Tuesday announced that Mansfield Public Schools will move the district’s state-mandated preschool program from the aging Rolling Green School to the Robinson School, and that the shift will result in the closure of Little Hornets, the district-run staff daycare program.

The move is intended to consolidate early childhood special-education services and to place the preschool program in a building that offers food service, a library and easier transitions into kindergarten, Murphy said. He described Rolling Green as “over 100 years old” and said an educational space study completed in 2023 documented substantial facility deficits and estimated a minimum replacement cost of about $20 million, which the state does not reimburse.

The change matters because the district’s preschool is a state-mandated educational program for children with disabilities beginning at age 3, Murphy said; the program includes full-day inclusion classrooms and substantially separate classrooms that must meet state staffing and class-size rules. The superintendent said the district currently operates seven classrooms at Rolling Green and may need capacity to expand to eight during the school year as students enter after evaluations.

At the same time, Little Hornets — a longtime staff daycare and early-learning site that serves infants through…