What we know about Poudre School District's plans to consolidate schools
Poudre School District plans to move Polaris Expeditionary Learning School into two west Fort Collins schools with declining enrollment, while moving its two alternative high schools into Polaris’ current building, Superintendent Brian Kingsley and district officials said in an email Thursday evening.
That news was shared in meetings with staff, students and families at the impacted schools earlier this week, and in an email from Superintendent Brian Kingsley and the district’s leadership team that went out to across the district Thursday evening.
Additionally, the Cooper Home and Community Connections programs, both serving students with special needs, will move out of their current locations and into the building that now houses Centennial High School.
A formal announcement of the consolidation plans is planned for Tuesday, Oct. 10, during a regularly scheduled Board of Education meeting.
Here’s what we know, based on the Thursday evening email, along with conversations with staff, students, parents and guardians from each of the impacted schools:
Polaris will be moved to Olander and Blevins
Polaris’ programs for students in kindergarten through fifth grade will be moved to Olander Elementary School, while those in grades 6-12 will move to Blevins Middle School.
“Neither will be a school-within-a-school model; students on both campuses will be part of the Expeditionary Learning model,” Kingsley and district officials said in the email.
Continuing students at Polaris will not need to take any additional steps to be enrolled in the program at the new campuses for the 2024-25 school year, the district wrote in an earlier email shared only with staff, students and families of the impacted schools.
More: Students at this Fort Collins school are learning scuba so they can repair coral reefs
Students now attending Olander Elementary School, 3401 Auntie Stone St., and Blevins Middle School, 2101 S. Taft Hill Road, who live within those schools’ boundaries and do not want to continue with expeditionary learning at those schools in 2024-25 can use the School of Choice program to attend a different school in the district. The School of Choice application process opens Nov. 1. Additional information on that process will be posted on the district website, psdschools.org.
Centennial High, PCA will be combined
The district’s two alternative high schools, Centennial and Poudre Community Academy, will be combined into a single program to be housed at the current site of Polaris Expeditionary Learning School, 1905 Orchard Place.
Renovations to the current building will be made to accommodate the change, according to emails from the district to impacted staff, students and their families.
Centennial had 141 students and PCA had 268 in 2022-23, the most recent year official enrollment counts are available from the Colorado Department of Education.
“The staff and students at PCA and Centennial, with support from the district, have been asked to work together to come up with how alternative education will look and feel in that space,” read the email. “This is not Centennial in one wing and PCA in another. It’s about coming together and building a vision of how we can best support our students and their unique needs.”
Students already enrolled in each of those schools who will be continuing in 2024-25 do not need to take any additional steps. Those interested in changing schools will be able to do so through the School of Choice program. An application process for school choice opens Nov. 1, and additional information will be posted on the district website, psdschools.org.
Community Connections, Cooper Home moving to Centennial building
Moving the Community Connections program, currently located in a house on the east side of Rocky Mountain High School’s campus, and Cooper Home, 217 E. Swallow Road, will both move into the building at 330 E. Laurel Ave., that is being vacated by Centennial High School. Both are part of the district’s Transitions Pathways program to provide students ages 18-21 with special needs in its integrated services program with assistance in job development and work-related skills, and to prepare them for independent living.
PSD is exploring moving additional Transitions Pathways programs, including Project Search, SWAP and CAMPUS, which support older students with disabilities, into that space, as well, according to the email.
Benefits of the change, according to the email, include “being closer to Colorado State University, one of the many PSD partners that support students with disabilities, as well as public transportation and the work-based learning opportunities in Old Town.
Why is the district making these changes?
Overall enrollment in Poudre School District has been declining for several years and is projected to continue, Kingsley said in a Sept. 26 email that was distributed to all staff, students and families in the district.
Expanding on that Thursday evening, Kingsley and PSD leadership wrote: “We must take proactive steps to address student enrollment that has been declining in PSD for several years largely because of the high cost of living in our community and decreasing birth rates in our region, in Colorado, and across the nation.
“PSD is not the only school district facing these challenges. Demographers project that PSD’s current enrollment of roughly 30,000 students will dip by about 10% over the next several years. That translates to a cut of about $40 million from PSD’s total annual budget of about $400 million.
“Acknowledging that the changes outlined below aren’t easy, our intent in making them is to lessen the impact of the extraordinary financial challenges on our horizon while investing in programs that are in public demand and essential to our students’ overall success.”
PSD’s overall enrollment has dropped in two of the past three years since reaching a high of 30,754 in 2019-20, according to data from the Colorado Department of Education. Official enrollment figures for the current school year are not yet available, but PSD’s total enrollment for the 2022-23 school year was 30,105.
When students attending the district’s five charter schools are removed from those figures, enrollment in PSD’s other schools has declined by nearly 1,000 students, from 28,283 in 2019-2020 to 27,289 in 2022-23.
Olander and Blevins are not the lowest-enrollment schools in the district, but they are losing students at a faster rate than others. Olander’s enrollment has fallen by 90 students, from 433 to 343 since 2019-2020, while Blevins’ has fallen from 629 to 504. Only about 40% of Blevins’ building is currently in use, the email said.
Olander’s location, near Spring Canyon Park, “makes it an ideal location to support expeditionary learning,” the email read. It went on to note that both Olander and Blevins were already using project-based curriculum, “and there is some natural alignment between the project-based and expeditionary learning models.”
Community engagement sessions planned
PSD has scheduled community engagement sessions for at least some of the impacted schools to discuss the changes. Those in attendance will be able to ask questions, provide feedback and share input that the district said will be considered as it moves forward with these plans.
Engagement sessions we are aware of have been scheduled for:
Polaris Expeditionary Learning School: 6-7 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 12, at Polaris, 1905 Orchard Place.
Poudre Community Academy: 6-7 p.m., Monday, Oct. 16, at PSD’s Johannsen Support Services Complex boardroom, 2407 Laporte Ave.
Centennial High School: 6-7 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 19, at Centennial, 330 E. Laurel St.
The district also has two board meetings scheduled for next week
5 p.m. Monday, Oct. 9: Special meeting at JSSC Boardroom (agenda items include discussion of diversity, equity and inclusion work and a closed-door, executive session on: a litigation update, legal performance feedback and superintendent performance feedback, per the posted agenda.
Tuesday, Oct. 10: Business meeting at JSSC Boardroom. An agenda had not been posted as of Thursday afternoon. These meetings typically start with a board dinner at 5:30 p.m., followed by the regular agenda at 6:30 p.m.
What’s the impact on teachers at these schools?
It was not immediately clear what will happen with teachers at the impacted schools.
The Poudre Education Association, which represents the district’s licensed teaching staff, has been involved in the meetings the district has had with staff at each of the impacted schools, PEA president John Robinson said. Teaching staff in PSD, he said, is based on enrollment numbers not building size or location.
“None of these conversations are fun, but they are necessary,” he said. “As a district and as a community, we have to make some really hard choices here. Overall, our association wants to make sure that programs are able to maintain the integrity and the level of service that we’ve been able to offer in the past, and we want to make sure our students have the right amount of educators and support staff at their schools.
“Naturally, people are trying to process what this means for them, what this means for their students, what this means for their building. We’re just helping teachers move forward with the consolidations and the mergers with fidelity.”
Impacted staff, parents express significant concerns
Staff and parents at the impacted schools have been quick to lash out at the district, primarily for what they said was a lack of transparency that prevented them from having any input on the decisions that were made.
Among their most frequent questions:
Why wasn’t it discussed in public by the Board of Education ahead of time, parents of two Polaris students, a Centennial staff member and current and former students at Polaris, Centennial and PCA asked in emails to the Coloradoan.
Multiple parents from Polaris expressed concerns about inclusivity at the combined schools, saying that was a big part of why they were sending their children there.
A Centennial teacher wondered how she and others were supposed to abandon instructional curriculum they’ve been using and refining for years and come up with an effective plan for alternative high school education with staff at Poudre Community Academy in just 10 months. When will the teaching staffs of the two schools be able to meet and come up with a plan while still teaching the students they have this year? Will they be paid for the additional hours to do that work? Will they have to give up their spring breaks or summer vacations?
Joe Gawronski, the founding principal of Polaris who retired this summer after 16 years, questioned the willingness of teachers at Olander and Blevins to participate in expeditionary learning program.
“The teachers at those schools did not interview and apply for jobs at a school that would have them taking elementary students off campus 12 to 15 times a year, and the secondary teachers did not apply to be at a school where they might go camping with their students for a week,” he said.
He also pointed out that all three schools – Polaris, Centennial and PCA – were often seen as a “last resort” within PSD for parents who would otherwise be moving their kids to charter schools or completely outside the district. These consolidations, he said, will likely take many of those students and their families out of PSD schools permanently, therefore accelerating the district’s enrollment decline.
Polaris, Gawronski said, has continually had to fight for its existence within PSD since its inception in 2007-08, surviving through moves to three different buildings in its first four years. The school went from the bottom of PSD’s secondary schools in the state’s annual performance report card framework in 2009-10, the first year of its implementation, to the top within five years.
“If we’re being data informed, as we promote, it seems as though the district would have had an interest in finding out what we were doing. But in my 16 years being principal, nobody from the district’s curriculum staff or professional development staff ever visited our school. Prior to COVID, we’d have three to five schools from outside our district, many from out of state, visiting our school to find out how we were doing things so well. But nobody from PSD ever came to talk to us about that.”
What other changes are in store?
The changes announced Thursday "are part of the first in a series that wil take place over the next couple of years," the email said. Additional consolidations and boundary changes will be considered. No boundary changes are “currently anticipated” for 2024-25, the email read.
“PSD is one of the strongest school districts in the state of Colorado because of the people here – our students, our staff, our families, and community members,” the email read. “We recognize that engaging and designing the next steps for each impacted site must happen in collaboration with our students, school-based staff, families and central office staff.”
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: What we know about Poudre School District plans to consolidate schools
