Poudre School District won't delay school consolidation process. Here's why, next steps

Slowing down the process of recommending school consolidations, closures and boundary changes to address declining enrollment in Poudre School District will only “re-traumatize the community,” Board of Education member Kevin Havelda said Tuesday night.

Members of the Facilities Planning Steering Committee agreed, telling the school board they had more than enough time and information to provide sound recommendations May 28 for the board to vote on June 11.

Dozens of people who have spoken out at listening sessions with the steering committee and one with the full Board of Education have argued that more time is necessary to make such important decisions with long-lasting effects. Several said so again Tuesday night in public comments to the school board.

“We are telling you loud and repeatedly, slow your roll,” said Grace Turnbull, the mother of a second grader and incoming preschooler at Lopez Elementary School.

Lopez is one of four elementary schools in west Fort Collins that was slated for possible closure in draft scenarios made public March 19 by the Facilities Planning Steering Committee. Those scenarios were not deeply vetted plans, said Josie Plaut, the committee facilitator and associate director of the Institute of the Built Environment at Colorado State University. They were put together to get the conversation started, so the committee could better understand the community’s priorities before making any final recommendations.

Plaut said revised scenarios the committee plans to announce May 7 will go through a more “rigorous, intense” evaluation process that will include additional community feedback through May 19 on another online questionnaire.

“I think we have all the information we need to make an informed decision,” committee member Micah Nielsen said. “Yes, it feels fast; I understand that. My concern is around the buildings that have been named in the scenarios. What happens to them next year if we truly slow this down? Are parents going to say, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to send my kids there; they were named.' What happens if they’re named next year? And, because we’ve slowed down, will those buildings see a mass exodus because of that unknown? That concerns me."

Nielsen said the committee is "putting in so much time now" so it can have a "fully informed decision" without extending the timeline.

The Facilities Planning Steering Committee provided an update on its work to the Board of Education during its regularly scheduled work session and meeting Tuesday, summarizing the feedback it received from the community in listening sessions and an online questionnaire and how that information would be incorporated into its revised scenarios.

Those scenarios have been submitted for modeling to Flo Analytics, an outside contractor, and will be accompanied by more detailed analysis on neighborhood impacts, educational program continuity, transportation, equity concerns and financial implications, Plaut said.

Based on feedback the committee received, the primary considerations should be to maintain community continuity and school-feeder patterns, maintain diverse educational programming, equity and access, and to optimize for transportation and accessibility.

Doing so will spread the impact out geographically across the district in a more balanced fashion than the initial draft scenarios did, said Nielsen, a social studies teacher at Boltz Middle School.

“I think the new scenarios that we submitted for modeling, they’re much more equal in terms of disruption geographically,” he said. “This is a community problem; it’s going to take the community to come together to fix it. And it should impact the community as equally as we can so it’s not just one part of the town.”

Noting that the 37-member committee had representatives who work with students with special needs in integrated services, people working with multilingual learners, students classified as homeless under the McKinney-Vento Act and other students from historically disadvantaged populations, Plaut said their specific needs will be carefully considered in the process.

“When we think about impacts, those impacts are amplified when we look at those vulnerable populations,” she said.

There was also a consensus among committee members, almost equally divided among parents and school or district staff, to refocus its efforts to reach targeted enrollments of 400 students for elementary schools and 700 for middle schools. Schools are financially optimized at that level, with the necessary per-pupil funding from the state to cover the costs of staffing for art, music and physical education as well as interventionists, a counselor and other critical student supports, PSD Chief Financial Officer Dave Montoya has repeatedly said.

Schools with enrollments closest to those levels tend to perform well in other measurables, too, steering committee member Amy Hoseth said. Hoseth is the parent of a student at Fossil Ridge High School.

Eleven of PSD’s 28 non-charter, non-mountain elementary schools have enrollments of 350 or fewer students this year, and five of the district’s eight middle schools have enrollments of 564 or fewer students. Average class size across the district is 19 students. If you remove the mountain schools, integrated services and Futures Lab from that calculation, the average class size is 21.

That’s well below the district’s target of up to 25 students in elementary school classes and up to 30 in middle and high schools, Superintendent Brian Kingsley and school board members have said.

After rattling off a highlight reel of district successes, including record graduation rates the past two years and a 13% improvement in elementary school literacy from fall to winter of this school year, Board of Education President Kristen Draper returned to the issue at hand.

“None of this changes the fact that we have thousands of empty seats in our school district right now,” she said. “Nearly 4,000 seats are empty in our elementary schools, nearly 2,500 middle-school seats are empty right now. With those empty seats comes a decrease in funding; this is a fact. This is something that we cannot change.

“Boundary shifts do not decrease the number of empty seats; it just moves the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. While we are looking everywhere for cuts, reductions that do not impact schools directly — as an example, we have a $2.1 million cut in the central office coming — there is no way to save out of the position we are in. There is not enough money out there for us to save this.”

More: School board approves new graduation requirements for Poudre School District

Hoseth, Plaut and Nielsen said the steering committee was working on a rubric that would not only help it make final recommendations but also provide transparency to help the community understand how they were reached.

The steering committee documented more than 3,676 points of community engagement through its 16 sessions with students, eight community listening sessions, 1,797 responses to the online questionnaire and 164 emails. Committee members spent more than 200 hours listening to feedback and more than 60 hours analyzing options, they said.

Feedback tended to be territorial, with those on the east side of the district preferring scenarios that caused the least disruption to schools near them and those on the west side preferring scenarios that caused the least disruption to their schools. The highest number of responses received in the online questionnaire came from students, staff and parents associated with the schools that would be impacted the most by the draft scenarios — Bethke, Beattie, Cache la Poudre, Dunn, Lopez, Olander, Timnath and Traut elementaries; Blevins, Cache la Poudre and Kinard middle schools; Timnath Middle-High School, Poudre Global Academy and Polaris Expeditionary Learning School.

In response to questions from members of the school board, the steering committee representatives said they have received an overwhelming amount of data and that PSD leadership, as well as Flo Analytics, has been quick to provide additional information and explanation, as needed.

“I’m mindful of the financial implications this district is already facing with empty seats and reduced budgets,” Hoseth said. “I know from talking to some administrators that their budgets are already very slim for next year, and that’s having an immediate impact on schools.

“... I also feel like this is one of those difficult scenarios where we could keep trying to make the perfect decision for a long time and circle it and maybe get a millimeter closer with every passing month but never fully figure it out.”

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: Poudre School District won't delay school consolidation process