City Council members, state representative urge Poudre School District to protect Blevins

State representative Andrew Boesenecker and the Fort Collins City Council members representing districts on the west side of the city are urging Poudre School District officials to remove Blevins Middle and Olander Elementary schools from consolidation discussions.

Both schools would have been consolidated with Polaris Expeditionary Learning School under a plan that was withdrawn by Superintendent Brian Kingsley because of widespread community opposition. And both were listed as schools that could possibly be closed in draft scenarios prepared by the Facilities Planning Steering Committee and released publicly March 19.

In a joint letter sent this week to Kingsley, members of his cabinet, the Board of Education and the steering committee, Boesenecker and City Council members Melanie Potyondy and Kelly Ohlson said those schools were unfairly harmed when they were named for possible closure last fall.

“We are especially concerned that the failed effort at consolidation in the fall of 2023 has damaged the reputation of specific west-side schools, namely Olander Elementary and Blevins Middle School,” reads the letter, which Potyondy shared publicly on Facebook. “Since having publicly been identified as sites worthy of closure, these schools have not only entered current consolidation conversations on uneven footing due to stigma but have experienced real impacts in their fall 2024 enrollment numbers. Additional west-side schools’ reputations have been damaged as consolidation conversations have proceeded, as well, albeit over a shorter period of time."

UPDATE: School board president responds to politicians' letter regarding PSD school closure plans

Blevins’ enrollment this fall is down 85 students from fall of 2022, according to the Colorado Department of Education’s database, from 504 to 419. Blevins had 652 students in 2017-18 and could reasonably accommodate as many as 892, according to figures prepared by PSD architect Brian Carnahan and available on the district's long-range planning website. There were 279 middle school-age children living within the Blevins attendance area who choiced out to other schools, and 67 from elsewhere in PSD choicing in to Blevins in 2022-23, the only year for which that data was available, according to a Flo Analytics report that's also available on PSD's long-range planning website.

Olander’s enrollment declined by three students, from 343 to 340, from the fall of 2022 to the fall of 2023. It had more than 430 students from the fall of 2017 to the fall of 2019, and could reasonably accommodate 452. Olander had 67 students within its boundaries choice out to other schools, and 118 choice in from elsewhere in PSD in 2022-23.

Declining enrollment and under-utilization of buildings was listed as a key factor in the steering committee’s work on preparing recommendations for school consolidations, closures and boundary changes.

Revised scenarios are expected to be released publicly May 7, steering committee facilitator Josie Plaut told the Board of Education last week. Recommended options will be presented to the school board May 28 and voted on June 11.

PSD receives its state funding on a per-pupil basis, and as enrollment declines, the district has to supplement school budgets to provide what it considers a base level of staffing and programming, Kingsley and Chief Information Officer Madeline Novey said. PSD is spending $6.6 million on that supplemental funding this year and expects to spend $7 million on it next year, Chief Financial Officer Dave Montoya said.

Boesenecker represents west Fort Collins’ District 53 in the Colorado House of Representatives. Potyondy’s City Council district covers southwest Fort Collins, and Ohlson’s covers west Fort Collins. Potyondy is a school psychologist at Rocky Mountain High School. Olander and Blevins both feed into Rocky Mountain.

“West Fort Collins has been the biggest focus of the conversation,” Potyondy said Wednesday. “It all started with Olander and Blevins potentially absorbed into Polaris. The west side has been the nexus of the consolidation discussion, so we all felt like it was appropriate to speak up for the west side of town and our schools.”

Their letter acknowledged the “financial challenges the district faces, including schools operating under capacity and the pressing need for capital improvements.

“However, we believe the current approach to consolidation will deepen inequities of access across the district, damage long-standing high school feeder system relationships, and contribute to the alarming erosion of trust that we have observed in our community throughout this process.”

It then went on to address specific concerns about Blevins, which was placed on a priority improvement plan in 2022 by CDE.

“Their entry into consolidation talks,” the letter reads, “occurred while the school was actively striving to remediate negative impacts that spring from years of weak school leadership that went unchecked by the district.”

A new principal and administrative team were hired in the fall of 2022, and the school was “experiencing growing and measurable success” before finding itself targeted for consolidation last fall, the letter reads. The school’s “academic scores have improved, culture has been recovering, and behavioral standards have been re-normed.”

The letter goes on to note that the district “tacitly” made a commitment to new principal Joe Zappa when he was hired to “rehabilitate a struggling school” and that “targeting Blevins for closure just over a year into his tenure violates that commitment and, if followed through with, will result in long-term harm to the educational opportunities available on the west side of PSD.”

Timnath’s Town Council passed a resolution asking the district to keep Timnath students in Timnath schools, and Larimer County Commissioner John Kefalas asked the Board of Education to protect Laporte’s schools — Cache La Poudre Elementary School and Middle School — for the sake of that community.

“I think our schools are such an integral part of what makes a community successful, because they’re in the heart of the community,” Potyondy said. “Seeing how much hurt this process has been causing for the folks in my neighborhood, for the children in these schools, I felt like I had to do something, and I know council member Ohlsen and representative Boesenecker felt the same way.”

Boesenecker, Potyondy and Ohlson blamed the district for allowing Blevins to fall into the state’s remediation process under its previous leadership. The letter urges PSD to not only exclude Blevins from the consolidation process but also to “formally commit to allowing them a minimum of five undisrupted years to rebuild.

“The district’s contribution to their decline is substantive, and their investment in their recovery should be commensurate,” the letter reads.

Closing Blevins, they wrote, will “create a vast school desert on the west side of town,” noting that the next-closest middle school, Webber, is nearly 3 miles away. Two others, Lesher and Lincoln, are a little more than 3 miles away, according to GoogleMaps.

The closure of Blevins would also “disproportionately impact an economic varied student body and displace a center-based special education program for students with emotional disabilities” in a school that operates “within one of the district’s most cost-effective buildings, which has one of the highest proportions of walkers/bikers in PSD.”

Much of Potyondy's work at Rocky Mountain High School is with students with special needs, she said. She is particularly concerned about disrupting the established path for students with emotional disabilities from Bennett Elementary to Blevins to Rocky Mountain.

The letter goes on to encourage the district to undertake a “comprehensive examination of alternative budget-trimming measures” to “minimize the need for consolidations and, in cases in which closures are necessary, limit the magnitude of negative impacts.”

It then lists a dozen criteria the writers believe the district should follow before it resorts to discussions about closing schools, which they argue should be viewed as a “last resort.”

“The goal is not to encourage favoritism,” Potyondy said. “Everyone is willing to have some flexibility. But it’s really important the district looks at using our resources wisely before building any new buildings.”

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, x.com/KellyLyell and  facebook.com/KellyLyell.news

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: City Council members, state rep advocate for PSD's west-side schools