Laporte residents ask commissioner to advocate for not closing Cache la Poudre schools

LAPORTE — Concerned about the lack of representation of their community in the school consolidation discussions, a group of Laporte residents met Saturday morning with Larimer County Commissioner John Kefalas in hopes he can advocate for keeping their schools open.

Cache la Poudre Elementary and Middle schools, which operate in separate buildings on the same campus in Laporte, would both be closed under one of the draft scenarios prepared by a Facilities Planning Steering Committee tasked with creating consolidation recommendations to present to the Poudre School District Board of Education later this month.

A variation of that scenario would keep both schools open but turn them into the new home of Polaris Expeditionary Learning School, a kindergarten through 12th grade school now operating out of a former elementary school 5 miles away in northwest Fort Collins.

Laporte is an unincorporated community in Larimer County. It doesn’t have a city or town council representing its interests the way Fort Collins and Timnath do. The Timnath Town Council passed a resolution last week urging Poudre School District to keep Timnath children in Timnath schools. And the Fort Collins City Council has been asked to advocate for schools threatened with closure in west Fort Collins to avoid creating “school deserts” that would be at odds with its efforts to create more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly neighborhoods.

The 16 Laporte-area residents at Saturday's meeting at the American Legion Post 4 hall asked Kefalas, the county commissioner representing the northern part of the county, including Laporte, to do the same for them. Poudre School District Superintendent Brian Kingsley and the Board of Education have said they need to consolidate and close schools and redraw boundaries for others to deal with declining enrollment and the associated loss of per-pupil funding.

More: How much money will Poudre School District save by closing schools? It's complicated.

Kefalas left the meeting vowing to do what he could to get the steering committee and Board of Education, which will have the ultimate say in the consolidation process, to treat the Laporte schools the same as the three mountain elementary schools — Livermore, Red Feather and Stove Prairie. Those schools, which all feed into CLP Middle School, are not included in the consolidation discussions because of their isolated geographic locations and importance to their respective communities, Kingsley and members of the steering committee said.

“It was very valuable to get the input for folks regarding the options being considered for Laporte schools,” Kefalas said. “I think one of the big takeaways that I think other people need to know is that the schools cover a lot of area of the county, and that’s a compelling reason why the CLP schools — their benefit is far-ranging — should be considered mountain schools and they should be off the table.”

Kefalas said he would see if the other two county commissioners are willing to do anything as a group to forward to the steering committee or school district when they meet again Tuesday. Either way, he said, he will do what he can to share that feedback with members of the Board of Education individually and at a scheduled community listening session on the consolidation options from 5:30-10 p.m. Tuesday night in the auditorium at Poudre High School, 201 S. Impala Drive.

Several parents expressed concern that Laporte is being treated like an “extension of Fort Collins” in this process, noting that they moved there intentionally to be in a smaller community, Others pointed out that the community has more affordable housing than Fort Collins and is, therefore, more likely to attract new families with young children to fill its schools back up again.

There are several large farms in the area that are just one sale away from becoming the next large housing development with as many as 1,000 new homes, one parent who works with developers through his job in construction said.

Others then asked what schools children from other new housing developments under construction and planned in north Fort Collins would attend. Some of the parents asked that their names not be attached to their comments, and only those that were shared anonymously by three or more are included in this story.

Lindsey Nightwalker, who has three children attending CLP schools, was concerned the steering committee was given a map that cropped out most of the school’s attendance area, which covers a large swath of northwestern Larimer County. The boundaries of both the elementary and middle school, she pointed out while sharing a map with the group, stretch from the top of Cameron Pass and the Jackson County line to the west, while the middle school also serves residents to the north up to the Wyoming border and as far east as neighborhoods just north of the Fort Collins Country Club that are within 2 miles of Interstate 25.

“It serves a huge demographic,” she said. “Mountain families are not all affluent families that have the means and resources, and Cache la Poudre provides essential resources to those families that otherwise would have no options or limited options.”

The schools also serve as important community gathering spots, several residents said, hosting multiple events each year. The schools’ combined campus served as disaster relief centers during the 2012 High Park Fire, 2013 floods and 2020 Cameron Peak Fire. And their location in Laporte is important to local businesses, too, bringing families from rural areas to the west, north and northeast to town for school activities on a regular basis.

“I hope they’re starting to realize and hear that it’s a community issue, that it’s bigger than just the schools, that it’s really affecting towns, plural,” said Erica Daniell, a parent with one child at the elementary school, one at the middle school and another that went through those schools and is now at Poudre High School.

“I keep saying this over and over again, but it’s a community hub.”

Several parents questioned the ability of the schools they would be consolidated into to handle the additional students. The plan puts CLP Elementary School students into Irish, Putnam and Tavelli elementaries and CLP Middle School students into Lincoln Middle School, which would also be taking in some additional students from the closing of Blevins Middle School contained in the same scenario.

For those who would be sent to Irish Elementary, there are also concerns about how they could be incorporated into its dual-language program with no prior knowledge of Spanish.

Equity was a concern, too, with a few parents expressing concerns that schools on the east and south side of the district, where residents are generally “whiter and wealthier,” as one said, are being favored at the expense of those on the north and west side of the district.

Kyla Conkling, who operates the Ten Bears Winery with her husband, William Conkling, was also concerned that the financial information about CLP that has been shared with the committee is skewed to make it seem less efficient than it actually is. For one thing, she and others pointed out, having both schools in the same campus allows them to share bus routes so that only one school bus, instead of two, is bringing kids down Poudre and Rist canyons and U.S. Highway 287 from as far north as the state line, respectively, each day.

That also helps families with working parents, Nightwalker said, because having all of her kids ride the same bus together to and from school each day eliminates the need for hard-to-find day care in the rural areas the schools serve.

The shared campus gives the elementary and middle schools the opportunity to share staff, as well, Kyla Conkling said, reducing the operating costs associated with the current enrollment declines within each building.

“CLP has been good stewards of PSD funds that they’re provided, even if it’s not directly provided, like with transportation,” Kyla Conkling said. “So not only are they supporting families by starting at the same time, but they’re also being good stewards of school district funds.”

And everyone involved was concerned the process is taking place too quickly to produce the best solutions.

The Facilities Planning Steering Committee is receiving feedback through an online survey on PSD's long-range planning website that will close at 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 17. There's an additional listening session for those who speak Arabic from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Monday, April 15, at University Village Center, 1600 W. Plum St.

The same draft scenarios that were made public at the March 19 meeting of the Board of Education will still be the ones on the table for the Board of Education’s listening session Tuesday night at Poudre High.

The steering committee is scheduled to provide an update to the school board at its regular meeting April 23, then revise its scenarios and make a formal recommendation of two to three options May 28. The only scheduled opportunity for public feedback after that is a second listening session with the full Board of Education from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. June 4 at Fort Collins High School.

The school board is scheduled for a final vote at its regular meeting June 11.

The “rushed timeline,” as Nightwalker said, is a huge concern.

“I don’t think they’re in as dire straits financially as they say they are and need to close schools,” she said.

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: Laporte residents ask county commissioner to advocate for CLP schools