Poudre School District weighs closings, consolidations. How we got here and what's next

New school consolidation and closure options are expected to be announced later this week by a Poudre School District committee, and a final vote by the Board of Education is scheduled for June 11.

PSD is planning to close some schools with low enrollments, combine others and redraw boundaries for the 2025-26 school year to address declining enrollment and the associated budget cuts.

Colorado funds its public schools on a per-pupil basis, with a dollar amount attached to each student, so as the number of students declines, so does the state funding.

PSD’s initial projections, prepared with the help of an outside consultant, Flo Analytics, called for an enrollment decline of nearly 10% from 2022-23 through 2027-28, which would represent budget reductions of about $8 million a year and $40 million over five years.

That would represent a substantial hit to the district’s annual operating budget, which is about $410 million this year.

Although PSD’s enrollment hasn’t dropped as rapidly as Flo Analytics projected, it is still declining — from an all-time high of 30,754 in 2019-2020 to 29,914 this year, according to the Colorado Department of Education’s annual count.

Where did the students go?

Declining birth rates both nationwide and in Larimer County, coupled with rapidly increasing housing costs in and around Fort Collins, have reduced the number of people with school-age children moving into the district’s expansive boundaries, which stretch from the Continental Divide on the west to the Wyoming border on the north, as far south as Loveland and east into Windsor to the Larimer-Weld county line.

In and of itself, the decline of 840 students over the past five years wouldn’t necessarily be cause for alarm.

But increasing enrollment in charter schools, public schools that are allowed to operate with a significant amount of autonomy under Colorado law, is accelerating the enrollment decline in PSD’s non-charter schools. Non-charter school enrollment in the district fell from 28,256 students in 2019-20 to 26,970 in 2023-24 — a decline of 1,286 students in five years, a Coloradoan analysis found using Colorado Department of Education data.

At the same time, enrollment in the district’s five charter schools — Compass Community Collaborative, Fort Collins Montessori, Liberty Common, Mountain Sage and Ridgeview Classical — has grown by 474 students. Although the state’s per-pupil funding for those district-authorized charter schools passes through PSD, the district can only deduct a small amount for specific administrative costs as defined by state law.

The district is also losing students to charter schools outside of PSD, authorized through Colorado’s Charter School Institute. Four of those schools are within PSD’s boundaries: The Academy of Arts and Knowledge, Ascent Classical, Axis International and Colorado Early Colleges. And their combined enrollment of 2,166 this year is 397 students higher than it was in 2019-20, the year before Ascent opened its Northern Colorado location in northwest Windsor.

Private schools within PSD’s boundaries have gained enrollment in the past five years, too. The combined enrollment for those with students in kindergarten through 12th grade is 890 this year, up 127 students from their 2019-20 total of 763.

Although parents choosing to home-school their children nearly doubled when PSD and other schools shifted to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic — increasing from 344 students in the fall of 2019 to 766 in the fall of 2020, according to Colorado Department of Education data — that trend has dropped significantly since then. This fall, there were 294 students within PSD’s boundaries who were home-schooled full time, according to the state education department. That’s 100 fewer than there were just a year earlier.

Impacts of declining enrollment

The financial impact of declining enrollment on the district, as a whole, is significant. But it affects programming at individual schools, too, PSD officials said.

At a certain point, the per-pupil funding no longer provides enough money to cover the costs of full-time teachers for art, music and physical education or for interventionists to help students struggling with reading or math catch up to their peers. Or for front-office staff, nurses or health technicians, mental health specialists, counselors, etc.

As enrollment falls and principals or other building administrators look for cost savings, those positions are often reduced to less than full time — making it hard to hire and retain those teachers and specialists — or eliminated altogether.

PSD has set a baseline level of student support that it won’t allow schools to fall below in an effort to provide equitable education to students at all of its schools. But the costs of subsidizing the per-pupil funding to pay for those positions — $6.6 million this year and an estimated $7 million in 2024-25, according to Dave Montoya, the district’s chief financial officer — increases as enrollment decreases, and money that could be used to enhance educational programming or staffing elsewhere is diverted to those low-enrollment schools.

The optimal enrollment from a financial standpoint, Montoya said, is about 400 students or more for an elementary school and 700 or more for a middle or high school. Eight of PSD’s 26 non-mountain and non-charter elementary schools have 340 or fewer students this year, and five of its eight non-charter middle schools have enrollments below 550.

“Equity is a priority and focus” as the district develops plans for consolidations, closures and boundary changes, PSD Board of Education President Kristen Draper wrote in an email Friday to the Coloradoan.

“Many of our elementary schools with enrollments above 400 have fully funded specials (librarians, art, music, PE, etc.), mental health professionals, after school clubs and recess monitors. For elementary schools with enrollments under 250 students, the district simply cannot afford to continue to supplement all of these very important roles,” she wrote. “By increasing enrollment in our schools, we are trying to make sure that every child continues to have every learning opportunity and ability to pursue their passions, regardless of address and ZIP code.”

Who is working on the district’s consolidation plans?

After scrapping a plan last fall that would have moved Polaris Expeditionary Learning School’s program into two west-side schools with low enrollment and combined the district’s two alternative high schools into one because of overwhelming community opposition, Superintendent Brian Kingsley and the school board committed to a process that would incorporate community input.

The district contracted with Colorado State University’s Institute for the Built Environment to put together a Facilities Steering Planning Committee that would be representative of the district’s various constituencies.

Slots were allotted for those representatives, and more than 100 people applied, facilitator Josie Plaut, associate director of the Institute for the Built Environment, said. The 37-member committee that was selected is split almost equally among school district employees, from the central office as well as individual schools, and other community members. The 18 district employees include school administrators, classified staff, teachers and other licensed staff. The other 19 members include 14 parents or guardians, two community at-large members and three representatives of employee associations.

Those community members include a former Fort Collins city planner now working for Larimer County, the city’s former environmental services director, a program manager with the Bohemian Foundation, a mental health professional, CSU faculty members and a health system manager.

There was also a conscious effort to balance the committee by geographical location within the district, using the feeder schools of the district’s four traditional high schools and its two new middle-high schools. The district’s alternative schools are also represented on the committee, as is its integrated services department for children with special needs.

What is the steering committee doing?

The steering committee has been analyzing a variety of data provided by the district, much of it publicly available on PSD’s long-range planning website, as well as available data from the Colorado Department of Education and other sources.

Using a long list of criteria provided by the Board of Education for its work, the committee developed draft scenarios that were shared publicly March 19 to solicit community feedback through eight public listening sessions and an online survey.

Those scenarios included a number of school closures, consolidation and boundary changes, creating a significant amount of angst among students, staff and families connected to the schools that would be impacted the most. Various scenarios listed Beattie, Cache La Poudre, Dunn, Lopez and Olander elementary schools as ones that could be closed. Blevins, Cache La Poudre, Kinard and Preston middle schools were also threatened with closure in one or more of the scenarios. The alternative high schools, Centennial and Poudre Community Academy, would be combined under one scenario, and Timnath Middle-High School would become a high school only under another.

What concerns were most prevalent among community members?

Parents, students, staff and alumni from every school that would be impacted by one or more of the options presented in the draft scenarios spoke passionately about the importance of keeping their specific school open.

Programs for students with special needs were frequently discussed, with concerns raised about the ability to move or incorporate those programs into other schools in other buildings.

Equity was mentioned frequently as well, with several of the schools with the lowest enrollments serving some of the district’s most diverse and economically disadvantaged communities — students who don’t necessarily have the same options as others to get to and from a school outside of their neighborhood through the school choice process. Although specific listening sessions were held with interpreters for those who primarily speak Spanish and Arabic, several people expressed concerns that those families were not being adequately represented in consolidation and closure discussions.

Concerns were also raised about special programming at neighborhood schools. Dunn Elementary, which was recently recertified for five more years by the International Baccalaureate program with no recommendations for improvement needed, was slated for closure under one of the scenarios. Same with Lopez Elementary, the district’s only school with the Leader In Me program. Lopez was notified last week that it had received “legacy” status in that program, a distinction held by fewer than 20 schools in the world, district spokesperson Emily Shockley said in an email.

Dunn is also the district’s most diverse school, with students from more than 50 different countries speaking more than 25 different native languages. Among the district’s neighborhood schools, Dunn has the highest number of students from outside its boundaries attending through the district’s school choice program.

Olander Elementary, another school slated for possible closure, is the only project-based learning school in the district and has a unique integrated learning program that keeps all of its students with significant disabilities and special needs in classrooms alongside their peers. Olander has the second-highest number of students from outside its attendance opting in through school choice.

Beattie Elementary, also slated for possible closure, is the only school in the district using the open-classroom model with no interior walls separating classes of students in pairings of two grades apiece taught by co-teachers. Students studying education at CSU often come to Beattie to get a real-life example of that instructional model.

There were also worries about creating school “deserts” through the closure of schools like Blevins, Cache La Poudre and Beattie that are relatively far away from the next-nearest school. The city of Fort Collins, several people noted, is involved in efforts to create walkable and bikeable neighborhoods that closing some of these schools would negatively impact.

Preston Middle School lost nearly half of its students when the district drew boundaries for the new Timnath-Middle High School, which is bursting at the seams from overcrowding issues before it even welcomes its first class of 12th graders next fall. It has also been impacted the most by the district’s only 100% choice middle school, Kinard, just 1 ½ miles away. There were more students living in Preston’s attendance area in 2022-23 attending Kinard than attending Preston, according to a Flo Analytics report on school choice patterns available on the PSD long-range planning website.

Politicians are weighing in on the process

Timnath’s Town Council passed a resolution urging PSD to keep Timnath students in Timnath schools. Laporte residents met with Larimer County Commissioner John Kefalas asking him to intervene to save its only schools, Cache La Poudre elementary and middle schools. And two Fort Collins City Council members representing west-side districts, and a state representative from a west Fort Collins district, wrote a letter to Kingsley and Board of Education members insisting that Blevins Middle School be removed from the discussion because of the damage done to its reputation and that of nearby Olander Elementary with the since-withdrawn October plan to consolidate them with Polaris. They also asked the district to spread out the closures and consolidations across the district rather than focusing only on schools in west Fort Collins, where enrollment declines have been the sharpest.

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

What does a school operating at ‘full capacity’ mean?

The school capacity figures PSD has shared publicly throughout this process have been confusing, to say the least, with the district citing three different figures for each school in the data it has shared on the long-range planning website.

There’s the “room index capacity,” which counts the number of teaching spaces available in a building and multiplies it by 25 for elementary schools and by 30 for middle and high schools without taking into account spaces used as cafeterias, gymnasiums, music rooms, computer labs or other specialized uses.

The “national standard capacity” uses national norms for how school buildings are used to account for those additional spaces and applies a percentage factor to the room index capacity — 80% for an elementary school, 75% for a middle school, 80% for a middle-high school and 85% for a high school.

Using the building blueprints for each PSD school and information about how district schools used their available spaces, PSD architect Brian Carnahan created the third figure listed, revised national standard capacity figures for each school, where necessary, lowering some. Five PSD elementary schools — Bamford, Beattie, Irish, Linton and Putnam — have enrollments this year below 60% of what their buildings can accommodate. Four others — Dunn, Harris, Shepardson and Timnath — are operating above those capacities. Three PSD middle schools are also operating with enrollments below 55% of their capacities this year: Blevins, Cache La Poudre and Preston. The only PSD high school operating well below its building capacity this year is Centennial, an alternative high school with an instructional program designed around smaller-than-usual class sizes.

Those figures include early childhood education students and classrooms, which state regulations cap at a maximum of 16 students apiece, and modular buildings being used for instructional purposes. The steering committee was told to work with capacity figures that exclude early childhood students and to avoid options that would require the purchase of any new modular buildings, PSD Chief Information Office Madeline Novey said.

The capacity figures the district is using are well below the fire-code capacities of the classrooms and schools, Carnahan said, and designed to allow for normal activity for students at that grade level with no more than 25 students in an elementary school class and no more than 30 in a middle or high school class.

“The process of analyzing the buildings is not done in a vacuum; it’s not done with disregard to how a school is currently being used,” Carnahan said. “But it also is somewhat of an objective look at each of the schools.”

What comes next?

The Facilities Planning Steering Committee is expected to unveil revised scenarios for additional community feedback Friday and share them formally with the Board of Education at its next meeting, May 14.

A new online survey for feedback on those scenarios will be available when those scenarios are made public through May 19, Plaut said.

The steering committee will incorporate that feedback into final recommendations of two to three scenarios that it will present to the school board at its May 28 meeting.

The Board of Education is scheduled to hold a listening session to hear feedback on the final recommendations at 5:30 p.m. June 4 in the auditorium at Fort Collins High School. A previous listening session with the school board on the draft scenarios drew about 350 people, including 140 who spoke up to share their concerns.

The school board is scheduled to vote on a consolidation, closure and boundary-change plan at its June 11 meeting.

No changes will take place until the 2025-26 school year, Kingsley and school board members have said repeatedly, giving the district and impacted schools more than a year to develop plans and implement the changes.

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: As PSD weighs school closings, how did we got here and what's next?