Enrollment declining slower than projected as Poudre School District weighs consolidations
Aging buildings that can’t be cooled on hot days. Declining enrollment leading to empty classrooms. Reduced funding. Staffing shortages. Increased public scrutiny of classroom curriculum.
Poudre School District appears to be facing more crises at one time than ever before, and how each is addressed will shape public education in and around Fort Collins for decades to come.
There are no easy answers or quick fixes.
But the situation might not be as dire as Superintendent Brian Kingsley and the PSD Board of Education suggested while preparing for a 10% decline in enrollment — and the per-pupil state funding of $40 million or more attached to that drop — over the next five to 10 years.
“If we do nothing, we will put our entire school district’s long-term viability in jeopardy,” Kingsley said at a Jan. 23 meeting of the school board. “We will put at risk our mission and reason for being.”
While Kingsley and school board members spoke of annual declines of 500 or more students based on the number of high school graduates relative to incoming kindergartners, actual enrollment counts and projections by state demographer Nancy Gedeon paint a different picture.
Enrollment in PSD’s non-charter schools for students in kindergarten through 12th grade declined by 239 students from 2022-23 to 2023-24, according to the Colorado Department of Education’s official October count that was not released until January. That’s less than half of the 540-student drop projected by PSD leadership and its demographic consultant, Flo Analytics.
An updated enrollment count in January, shared with the Coloradoan by the Poudre Education Association, showed 192 more K-12 students in PSD’s non-charter schools than the official October total of 25,967.
That suggests PSD’s projection of a 9.26% enrollment drop from the 2022-23 school year to the 2027-28 school year was overstated. Using much of the same data, Sarah Siegel, the director of strategic research and data for the Colorado Education Association, projects a drop of 0.6% annually, or 3.6% total, over that same six-year period, PEA President John Robinson said.
“That just demonstrates to me, it’s not as dire as the projections they’re getting,” Robinson said. “... I want to be very accurate on what numbers we’re using and come to an accord with the district on those demographic projections and financial projections, because what we’re talking about is people losing their careers.”
Since 2017-18, total enrollment in PSD’s non-charter schools has declined by an average of 113 students annually. Losses in grades K-8 have been offset by gains in grades 9-12, Kingsley said.
Gedeon, in a remote presentation at the school board’s Feb. 20 meeting, noted that birth rates are declining and death rates are rising across the state, leading to overall population growth of just 1.1% from 2000 to 2020 — roughly half the 2% growth rate Kingsley has said PSD would need to maintain its current enrollment.
But she also noted that Larimer County, and the PSD attendance area specifically, is still growing at a faster rate than the state overall at 1.9% from July 2020 to July 2022. And she and her staff are projecting a 14% increase in children ages 0-4 and a stable population with no growth or decline among 5- to 17-year-olds in Larimer County from 2020-2030
That doesn’t necessarily mean PSD shouldn’t move forward with its plans to explore school consolidations, closures and boundary changes, as school board member Jim Brokish and Kingsley said afterward.
“I think it’s important to note that projection is a gradual increase from the current dip,” Brokish said. “When you really think about how long it’s going to take for those kids to get into kindergarten and for those kids to get into fourth and fifth grades and have a material impact on our enrollment, it is further out. So, I think it’s still important to note that we need to continue the work we’re doing.”
Facilities Planning Steering Committee tasked with recommending next steps
The bulk of that work has been passed on to a 37-member Facilities Planning Steering Committee that began meeting last month to develop two to three scenarios to recommend to the Board of Education. Those options will be presented publicly for the first time at the school board's March 19 meeting, which begins at 6:30 p.m. at the district's Johannsen Support Services Center, 2407 Laporte Ave., PSD Chief Information Officer Madeline Novey wrote in a March 8 email to the Coloradoan that was also shared with the staff and students' parents and guardians. Seating in the school board's meeting room is limited, Novey wrote, encouraging those interested to tune in to a livestream on PSD's YouTube channel.
Six public listening sessions, for the committee to gather feedback from the community, are scheduled over the next two weeks, with a seventh planned April 4 with interpreters for participants whose primary language is Spanish and an eighth at a time and place to be determined for those who primarily speak Arabic. Times and dates of some of those meetings have changed since they were originally announced and posted on PSD's long-range planning website, psdschools.org/long-range-planning.
Sessions are scheduled for:
Wednesday, March 20 – 7:30-8:30 a.m. at Timnath Middle-High School, 4700 E. Prospect Road, Timnath
Wednesday, March 20 – 6-8 p.m. at Fort Collins High School, 3400 Lambkin Way, Fort Collins
Monday, March 25 – 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., PSD Information Technology Center, Aspen rooms 1-2, 2407 Laporte Ave., Fort Collins
Monday, March 25 – 6-8 p.m. at Rocky Mountain High School, 1300 W. Swallow Road, Fort Collins
Wednesday March 27 – 6-7 p.m. online (a link will be provided on the PSD long-range planning website)
Thursday, March 28 – 5:30-7:30 p.m. at Lincoln Middle School, 1600 Lancer Drive, Fort Collins
Thursday, April 4 – 6-8 p.m. at Future Ready Center at Foothills mall, 215 E. Foothills Parkway, Suite 510, Fort Collins (near the northwest entrance). Interpreters will be available for those who primarily speak Spanish.
Additional community listening sessions with members of the Board of Education have been scheduled for 5:30-10 p.m. April 16 in the auditorium at Poudre High School, 201 S. Impala Drive, and June 4 in the auditorium at Fort Collins High, 3400 Lambkin Way.
The school board is scheduled to vote on a recommended plan at its June 11 meeting, with implementation planned for the 2025-26 school year.
The Facilities Planning Steering Committee was selected through an application process designed to provide an appropriate amount of representation to various stakeholders, including 18 PSD staff members; 14 parents or guardians; two community representatives; and one appointed representative of the employee associations representing the district’s school administrators, classified employees and teachers. Three seats that were to be filled by classified staff and one by a teacher or other licensed employee went unfilled “due to a lack of applications,” PSD officials noted while announcing committee members.
The committee’s recommendations are supposed to address modification to school attendance areas, including consolidation of schools; buildings in which PSD should not invest more capital dollars; and placement of educational programs.
No changes will go into effect prior to the 2025-26 school year, Kingsley and Board of Education members said after the superintendent withdrew the first part of a consolidation plan last fall because of significant opposition. That plan had been developed without any input from school staff, students or the public.
More than 100 parents and school staff gathered at one of the impacted schools on a Sunday to organize protests that included student walkouts from impacted schools to PSD offices each of the next two days as well as a protest outside the Oct. 10 Board of Education meeting, where the plan was scheduled to be voted upon without any public discussion.
Polaris Expeditionary Learning School was going to be moved to Olander Elementary and Blevins Middle schools; alternative high schools Centennial and Poudre Community Academy were going to be combined into one school in the building now housing Polaris; and many of the district’s programs for 18- to 21-year-olds with special needs were going to be moved into the historic building that now houses Centennial.
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Although the committee was told it “is not required” to move forward with that plan and to start its evaluation process with a clean slate, there is no guarantee it won’t be included in whatever recommendations are made.
What data is being considered?
The Facilities Planning Steering Committee has a significant amount of data beyond enrollment numbers and projections to consider, much of it publicly available on PSD's long-range planning website.
There are studies that were completed over the summer and fall by an outside contractor, McKinstry Engineering, LLC, on the feasibility of installing solar energy options at PSD schools; the cost of adding air conditioning or other adequate cooling systems to the 34 district schools without; a comprehensive facility condition assessment on each of the district’s buildings; and a retro-commissioning detailing the functionality and efficiency of existing facilities and their mechanical systems.
Many of the dollar amounts on those studies are staggering, with estimated costs for adding air conditioning ranging from $5 million to $7 million at most of the elementary schools to more than $11 million at Lesher Middle School, and other recommended capital improvements over the next 20 years running from $4.43 million at Shepardson Elementary to $12.64 million at Eyestone Elementary.
PSD’s 2023-24 budget includes just $900,000 for capital projects, and district needs over the next 20 years could exceed $2 billion.
Keeping those studies and their findings in mind, the committee is supposed to also look at recommended school capacities and the per-pupil cost within each school’s budget required to provide diverse programs and course options, including art, music, physical education and a wide range of electives. For example, the total budget of operating Centennial High School was projected to cost $11,960 per student this school year, compared to $5,415 per student at Fossil Ridge High School. PSD will spend $6.8 million this year on student-based budget adjustments to make up for losses in per-student revenue in underutilized schools, Chief Financial Officer Dave Montoya said at a January meeting of the Board of Education.
Average enrollment optimization to minimize those budget adjustments is about 400 students for elementary schools and 700 students for middle schools, Montoya said. Those totals are within the building capacities of PSD’s traditional schools with the exception of Harris Elementary (360) and Cache La Poudre Middle School (534) without the addition of modular buildings, according to data on the district’s long-range planning website. PSD’s four traditional high schools in Fort Collins have capacities ranging from 2,040 at Poudre to 2,270 at Fossil Ridge, while its combined middle-high schools in Timnath and Windsor have maximum capacities of 1,440. The district’s three mountain schools — all elementaries with students in multiple grades sharing a classroom and teacher — are to be evaluated through different criteria, PSD officials and the school board told the committee because of their geographic isolation.
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What other factors are being considered?
Committee members are also tasked with looking at various instructional programs — like Core Knowledge, International Baccalaureate and dual-language — and their availability geographically throughout the district as well as school-choice patterns of students opting in or out of PSD schools for schools in other districts or state-authorized rather than district-authorized charter schools. The net loss of students from PSD’s traditional schools to its charter schools from the 2017-18 school year through the 2022-23 school year was just eight, with 879 moving into charter schools and 871 moving from its charters back to traditional schools, according to data on the district’s long-range planning website.
An equity index for each school based on income levels and other socioeconomic demographics that PSD has developed, with 1.0 being the average, is also being shared with the committee for use in its work.
Kingsley said he is committed to making sure every voice is heard through the committee’s work, including students. And he thanked committee members for their willingness to participate in a process where difficult choices have to be made.
“Collectively, I believe that we are going to continue to be courageous and address the challenges that are in front of us in a proactive way, but also in difficult ways today, rather than kick the can down the road to the future for other people to deal with this problem and suffer greater consequences in the future.”
Dig into PSD enrollment data
Coloradoan reporter Kelly Lyell compiled enrollment data, capital costs, program details and more for each of PSD's non-charter schools:
▶ See data for PSD non-charter elementary schools here.
▶ See data for PSD non-charter middle schools here.
▶ See data for PSD non-charter high schools here.
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: Enrollment declines slower than projected as PSD weighs consolidations
