BVSD school board talks declining enrollment guidelines

Jun. 13—The Boulder Valley school board on Tuesday heard the final recommendations from the 29-person Long Range Advisory Committee, with only minor changes from the initial report presented last month on addressing small schools with declining enrollment.

The committee was tasked with developing guidelines the district can use as it grapples with the possible need for future school closures or consolidations as elementary enrollment continues to shrink.

Based on the recommendations, the district will start with an annual enrollment trend report that will be provided to the board in February. The report will include the number of classes per grade level and five-year enrollment projections for each elementary school.

The district currently has five elementary schools with fewer than two classes per grade level. That number is expected to double to 10 elementary schools by the 2025-26 school year and grow to 12 elementary schools by 2027-28.

The initial proposal was to designate schools with fewer than two classes per grade and enrollment below 60% of capacity in a "small school" tier, but school board members questioned if that would exacerbate open enrollment out of the school.

The final recommendations, instead of using tiers, starts with an "enrollment advisory" phase followed by a "community engagement" phase. The goal, said committee co-chairperson Yvette Salas, is to keep the goal of transparency, while reducing "alarm and stigma" for a declining enrollment school.

The district first would make the community aware that an elementary school in the advisory phase wouldn't receive extra resources. The school could be required to use multiage classrooms. Library, counseling, physical education, music and art staff members also could be limited to part-time positions.

The community engagement process would be triggered when enrollment declines below 50% capacity, the school has fewer than 1.5 classes per grade level and the school is projected to continue at that level for at least five years.

Outcomes following the process could include continuing to operate without extra resources, adding specialized programming to attract students and school closure or consolidation.

Not included in the recommendations are the district's small mountain elementary schools — Gold Hill, Jamestown and Nederland — which the committee suggested treating differently given their geographic challenges.

The final recommendations also include three recommended school board actions: evaluate open enrollment policies; study attendance boundaries to identify changes that could better balance resident student numbers; and conduct community surveys to identify desired or unmet needs, priorities and preferences.

While Boulder Valley's enrollment had been slowly declining, it was accelerated by the pandemic and is expected to continue to drop. The district is projecting K-12 enrollment to go from the current 27,489 students to 25,365 students over the next five years.

Fewer students overall means the district will receive less per-pupil revenue from the state, while needing to spend more money to maintain an increasing number of smaller schools. The fixed costs of running a small school are distributed among fewer students, diverting funding from other student and district needs.

"This is going to be one of the biggest challenges we face as a district," school board President Kathy Gebhardt said.

In other business, the school board approved Superintendent Rob Anderson's annual evaluation and extended his contract to 2026. Anderson starts his sixth year with the district in the fall.

His salary will increase at the same rate as the percentage increase provided to other administrators, plus an increase of one experience "step" on the administrator salary schedule. For the next school year, that equals an annual salary of $306,345, up from his current salary of $278,091.

In Anderson's evaluation, board members said they were pleased with his performance overall, praising him for accomplishments that included increased use of restorative practices, reduced disproportionality of exclusionary discipline for Latino students, and working with the Long Range Advisory Council on declining enrollment guidance.

"We are extremely fortunate to have Dr. Anderson as our superintendent," Gebhardt said.