200 Polaris students stage walkout, march to PSD offices to protest consolidation plans

Minutes after an impromptu meeting in the cafeteria with Superintendent Brian Kingsley, about 200 students from Polaris Expeditionary Learning School staged a walkout Monday to protest Poudre School District’s plans to consolidate their school and a handful of others.

Carrying signs with slogans that included “Pump The Brakes,” “Slow It Down,” “Hands Off Our Schools,” “We Will Stay Unified,” and “Save Our Culture,” students marched 1.3 miles to the Poudre School District administration building on West Laporte Avenue, asking the district and its Board of Education to involve the community in discussions about consolidating schools before moving forward with its plan.

Centennial High School students planned to do a similar walkout and march Tuesday, according to two students and a parent from that school that marched with Polaris students Monday, a day off on their school’s schedule.

The PSD Board of Education is scheduled to vote Tuesday night on a consolidation proposal that wasn’t made public until the evening of Oct. 5, when a districtwide email was sent out after the Coloradoan published a story online outlining some of those plans, based on meetings with staff and district emails to the impacted schools.

The consolidation plan calls for splitting up Polaris’ current school, which serves students in grades K-12, and relocating the students and its expeditionary learning curriculum to a pair of neighborhood schools in west Fort Collins that have experienced significant declines in enrollment in recent years. Polaris students in grades K-5 would move to Olander Elementary School, 3401 Auntie Stone St., while those in grades 6-12 would be combined with Blevins Middle School, 2101 S. Taft Hill Road.

Olander and Blevins were also chosen, the email to the Polaris community said, because of their proximity to Spring Canyon Park and natural areas west of Fort Collins that can support some outdoor expeditionary learning programs and existing curricula at each school that share some elements of the Polaris model.

Additional consolidations under the district’s plan would combine the district’s two alternative high schools, Centennial and Poudre Community Academy, into a single school in the building that now houses Polaris. And the district’s Cooper Home and Community Connections programs, and possibly others that serve students with special needs ages 18-21, would move into the building at 330 E. Laurel Street that now houses Centennial.

Kingsley arrived about noon to meet with students and staff in the lunch room at Polaris, parents and students said. He reiterated concerns about declining enrollment, budget reductions and efficient use of district facilities, students said.

Nothing from that appearance deterred more than half of the school’s 385 or so students from participating in their student-led protest.

They walked out of school at 12:25 p.m., grabbed signs that parents and friends had waiting for them in vehicles outside the school, and marched along sidewalks from the school’s playground to Taft Hill Road. Fort Collins police stopped traffic on Taft Hill between Elizabeth and Mulberry streets, while the students crossed at a stoplight, and then helped them safely navigate their way north to Mulberry, west to Impala Drive and north through the Poudre High School parking lot and campus to the PSD administration building.

More: What we know about Poudre School District's plans to consolidate schools

Parents, former students and other supporters handed out water bottles along the way, waved signs of support and then joined in the procession to PSD’s Johannsen Support Center, where the crowd had grown to about 350 people — all wanting to make sure Kingsley and other PSD leaders heard their voices.

Kingsley and other district officials have repeatedly declined requests to discuss the process and timeline that led to the consolidation plan, and there has been no discussion of it during public sessions of Board of Education meetings. Private discussion of such plans by the school board and its members would violate state open-meetings law.

The superintendent “deftly skirted around why they had picked this specific option and not any others,” while speaking Tuesday at Polaris, high school junior Otis Hepp said. “I didn’t get a feeling that he was really for us, either. I think he’s scared.”

Public backlash has been swift, with current school board members and candidates for seats open in the upcoming November election inundated with emails, phone calls, texts and messages through social media. About 120 staff, students and parents of impacted schools gathered Sunday at Olander to pool their resources to slow down or stop the plan’s approval. Fort Collins City Council member Shirley Peel sent a letter to the school board Monday asking for the same and council candidate Melody Potyondy spoke at Sunday’s meeting. A Change.org petition to save Centennial High School and its unique culture had 1,953 signatures as of 4 p.m. Tuesday.

Each of the impacted schools have unique cultures that students, staff and families believe will be lost in any consolidations.

“We want to keep our school together — the students, staff and teachers,” said Aria Weiner, a Polaris senior who helped organize the walkout and march. “You can put us in a different building and you can put us in larger classes, but our community is what makes our school what it is, and we don’t want to lose that.”

Another Polaris senior, Elin Docherty, was concerned about students feeling safe in a new environment, noting that many of the students attending the alternative schools involved in this consolidation plan had chosen their schools primarily for that reason.

More: Candidates for Poudre School District Board of Education differentiate themselves at forum

Emily Stiles, a 2016 Polaris graduate, said her survey of Polaris students suggested as many as 30% would leave PSD entirely — either for a neighboring district, private school or home-schooling — if the consolidation plan is approved.

Not Hepp.

He plans to graduate from Polaris in 2025, no matter where it’s located.

“I’m sticking with this school no matter what,” he said. “I’ve been here since freshman year. It’s probably the best community I’ve ever encountered in a school, and community is important to education. …

“The tight-knit community at this school makes it one of the best-performing schools in the district. We have a 91% graduation rate; people want to keep coming to this school. I’m surrounded every day by people who are eager to learn and are happy to be there and feel safe.

“I’m worried that they’re going to take our safety, our community and our inclusivity away.”

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

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: 200 Polaris students stage walkout, protest march to PSD offices