PSD school board sets framework, timeline for committee on school consolidation, closures
Although the newly appointed Facilities Planning Steering Committee has been told it will be working with a “clean slate,” the Poudre School District Board of Education established the framework and timeline Tuesday night for the committee's evaluation process as it looks at boundary changes, school consolidations and closings to address declining enrollment.
The 37 members of the volunteer steering committee, each representing key stakeholders, were identified Friday following a selection process that involved more than 100 applicants, including 31 who were recruited to apply when the initial pool failed to provide the desired representative makeup.
The committee consists of:
18 school staff members — six licensed, five classified employees and seven administrators.
14 parents or guardians, two from each high school feeder system, including alternative/transitions programs.
Two community representatives.
Three appointed representatives of the district’s employee associations, one each from the Poudre School Executives Association, Poudre Education Association and Association of Classified Employees.
Four seats — three for classified employees and one for a licensed employee — were left unfilled because of a lack of applications, two members of Superintendent Brian Kingsley’s cabinet said in a presentation to the school board at its regularly scheduled work session and business meeting Tuesday night.
The committee’s task is difficult but extremely important, Kingsley and members of the Board of Education said.
“This has been a problem that has gone unaddressed in PSD for several years, and it is only being addressed now,” Kingsley said. "… If we do nothing, it would put our entire school district’s viability in jeopardy. We will put at risk our mission and reason for being.”
What is the committee's role in whether Poudre School District consolidates schools, makes other changes?
The committee’s task is to take a deep dive into enrollment numbers, building utilization, facility needs, community served and educational programming offered at each of the district’s 54 noncharter schools over the next three months. The committee has been asked to engage the public while developing two or three scenarios for change to address the district’s challenges of decreasing enrollment and the resulting drop in per-pupil funding, estimated to be about 10% over the next five years, then make a final recommendation to the Board of Education at its May 28 meeting.
Six listening sessions will be held for the public to provide feedback on the steering committee’s work:
Monday, March 18: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., PSD Information Technology Center, 2413 Laporte Ave., Fort Collins
Monday, March 18: 6-8 p.m., Rocky Mountain High School, 1300 W. Swallow Road, Fort Collins
Tuesday, March 19: 4:30-6:30 p.m., Lincoln Middle School, 1600 Lancer Drive, Fort Collins
Wednesday, March 20: 7:30-8:30 a.m., Timnath Middle-High School, 4700 E. Prospect Road, Timnath
Wednesday, March 20: 6-8 p.m., Fort Collins High School, 3400 Lambkin Way, Fort Collins
Thursday, April 4: 6-8 p.m., PSD Future Ready Center at Foothills Mall, 215 E. Foothills Parkway (This session is designed for participants whose primary languages are Spanish and Arabic.)
The steering committee is being asked to sort through the data and other available information in the difficult process of choosing which schools and programs to retain while consolidating or closing others to bring a recommendation to the school board.
But “the Board of Education is the final decision-maker here,” said Lauren Hooten, the superintendent’s chief of staff.
When will Poudre School District make changes to address declining enrollment?
No changes will be made prior to the 2025-26 school year, Kingsley and school board members promised while shelving a controversial consolidation plan in October after widespread public opposition, including student walkouts and protests over two days outside the district’s administration building.
Has enrollment really dropped that much?
Declining birth rates are leading to decreased enrollment in public schools across the country, Kingsley said. That decline has been exacerbated locally by the rapidly increasing cost of housing, reducing the number of families with young children who can afford to live in and around Fort Collins, board President Kristen Draper said.
PSD has 1,500 to 3,000 empty seats in its noncharter elementary schools, enough to fill three to six schools entirely, and 1,500 empty seats in its middle schools, a total that would fill two middle schools, Kingsley and school board members, including Jim Brokish, have said repeatedly in recent months. The district will spend $6.8 million this year alone on student-based budget adjustments to make up for losses in per-student revenue in underutilized schools, PSD Chief Financial Officer Dave Montoya said.
Enrollment in PSD’s noncharter schools has declined each of the past four years, from an all-time high of 27,291 in 2018-19 to 25,964 this year, according to the official count made public last week by the Colorado Department of Education. There are about 600 to 700 fewer students in kindergarten and first grade than in 11th and 12th grade in PSD schools this year, Brokish pointed out.
“So, you know what’s going to happen as this wave rolls through our schools,” he said. “So, for the next five years, I expect easily a 10% drop, and I think that’s a minimum, personally. It won’t surprise me if it’s bigger than that. And we currently have 12 schools with less than 65% utilization.
“... I really want us to be bold on this, because I’m concerned, and I think it’s important that if we back up and say just a little bit is good enough, I’m concerned if things go worse than a 10% drop, now we’re in an even bigger thing and we’re coming back in three years and doing hard things again.
“I definitely favor doing what needs to be done now.”
How do sought-after improvements like adding air conditioning factor in?
Recent studies on the district’s facilities, including the feasibility of adding air conditioning to the 33 schools without it, identified nearly $2 billion worth of recommended infrastructure improvements over the next decade. Board members were insistent that those studies be included in the steering committee’s discussions and evaluation process to ensure the district doesn’t make a major capital investment in a school building that will be closed in the next five to 10 years.
Colorado State University’s Institute for the Built Environment is serving as an outside facilitator in the Facilities Planning Steering Committee’s selection and discussions and working with PSD’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Language, Culture and Equity teams and its integrated services staff to ensure the voices of those in marginalized populations are heard. The facilitator will also work with the steering committee to create opportunities for students to weigh in on possible changes, Hooten and PSD Chief Information Officer Madeline Noblett said in their presentation to the school board.
What are the guidelines for the Facilities Planning Steering Committee's work?
The guiding principles under which the steering committee is being asked to operate was determined through about 2 ½ hours of board discussion Tuesday night, centered around four questions:
What criteria should be used to evaluate schools for possible consolidation?
How can we expand programming across the district where there are waitlists?
How do we ensure that we are using our buildings as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible?
How do we address declining enrollment on the west side of the district and growing enrollment on the east side of the district?
Through its discussion of those four questions, board members created some guidelines for the committee’s work:
Start consolidation discussions with schools that have utilizations around 60% to 70%.
Aim for enrollment optimization of about 400 students for elementary schools and 700 students for middle schools, figures that were determined by principals in schools at those schools as providing the most opportunities through staffing and average class size of about 25 students.
Maximize access in terms of physical location and proximity to other schools and accessibility required by the Americans with Disability Act.
Attempt to make all current academic programs available to all students. Consider where programs are placed geographically and where there is demand.
Maximize program continuity in grades K-12 in terms of location and at each level.
Use data about current and previous school waitlists to inform recommendations, and work to understand why those waitlists exist. Are they connected to school programming or other factors?
Consider all creative grade configurations, including K-6 and K-8 models, to address access by all students to programming, building efficiency and enrollment, particularly on the growing east side of the district.
Using data, including recent facilities reports by McKinstry, set a standard floor of excellence for all buildings in PSD, and examine those that rank lowest and why they rank so low.
Focus time on how existing schools, particularly those on the west side of the district, can be utilized to be as fully enrolled as possible.
Focus on how boundary modifications could address growing enrollment on the east side of the district, now and in the next five years.
Building new facilities to accommodate growth on the east side of the district was determined to be outside the scope of the committee through the board’s discussion, noting that funding would have to be approved through the passage of a ballot measure by voters and new facilities could not be built soon enough to address the current challenges.
“We don’t just need a solution for five years from now, we need a solution much sooner,” board member Jessica Zamora said.
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: PSD school board sets guidelines for consolidation, closure discussion
