Wichita plans to close a number of elementary, middle schools at end of school year
An unspecified number of Wichita schools will be closed at the end of the school year to help offset a looming $42 million budget shortfall.
Staff will make recommendations on which schools should be closed and why at the next school board meeting on Feb. 12.
How many Wichita schools could close? Superintendent answers that and other questions
Decisions will be finalized by spring break, after ample opportunity for public input, Superintendent Kelly Bielefeld said.
Closures will be limited to elementary and middle schools because of the logistical challenges of relocating 1,000 to 2,000 high school students.
The expected shortfall, brought on in part by declining enrollment and the expiration of federal COVID-19 relief funds, necessitates hard decisions, district Chief Financial Officer Susan Willis told board members Monday evening.
Realistically, she said, balancing the budget will require either closing some aging and underused schools or laying off roughly 230 teachers, among other cuts. The district hopes to save at least $16 million through school closures.
Given the high level of staff vacancies across the district, all teachers and staff working in soon-to-be shuttered buildings will be given the option of reassignment to another Wichita school, Bielefeld said.
“We definitely want the message for staff to be, ‘We need you. We want you to stay here,’” he said.
Wichita Public Schools is the largest district in Kansas. But enrollment has been declining since 2016.
“We are a district built for 63,000 students. We currently educate 47,000 students and change,” Willis said. “By definition, we are underutilizing square footage in our buildings — specifically elementary and middle.”
Cooperative Strategies, an Ohio-based consulting firm hired by the board to assess facilities needs, reported last month that Wichita can’t afford to maintain all 54 of its elementary schools. Nearly half have fewer than 350 students.
The consultant determined there are more than 18,500 vacant seats across Wichita schools, with most elementary and middle schools below two-thirds capacity. Cooperative Strategies says target utilization should be between 85% and 95%.
“We cannot maintain at the level of buildings we have today from a purely maintenance standpoint,” Willis said. “We cannot keep up with it. We just can’t. We’re doing the best we can.”
USD 259 will begin mailing out postcards this week to all district residents with a link to an online survey seeking input on long-term school facilities priorities. A public hearing on building closures will be held in March before decisions are finalized.
Between March and May, the district will communicate with parents of affected children about where they will attend next school year, Bielefeld said.
“We want to recognize that change is hard and the unknown creates anxiety,” board member Diane Albert said as discussion wrapped up. “Disruptions are destabilizing, and we recognize that, so these are hard decisions that are not being made lightly. There are no perfect solutions. There are only really trade-offs.”
Other planned cost-saving measures outlined by the CFO include a 5% minimum cut to non-school program budgets (finance, HR, health services, etc.), pausing the district’s administrative intern program and scaling back the number of schools that participate in the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) college readiness program.
