GOLDEN — School closures have become a third-rail issue for education leaders in Jefferson County, with the school board voting late Thursday to spare four of five elementary schools that had been proposed for shut down as the 86,000-student district struggles with budget constraints.
Pennington, Peck, Stober and Swanson, which were presented to the school board last month for possible closure, got a reprieve Thursday. Pleasant View Elementary in Golden, also on the closure list, was the only school to get the ax.
The board’s decision came less than a year after it decided to forgo closing a dozen schools in the 155-school district after parents and neighbors fought fiercely to preserve their schools. That spirited fight was on display again Thursday as a large crowd gathered to urge the board to keep schools open.
“I can’t reconcile in my mind closing high-performing schools,” said board member Brad Rupert, as he suggested removing Peck from the closure list. “I don’t want to put at risk successful schools or successful programs.”
Board member Amanda Stevens said that while Peck has facilities challenges, it serves a strong community and is a good school that should get a closer look before it is mothballed.
“We are not a building,” she said of the Peck community.
But she and her colleagues warned a packed board room that the state’s second-largest school district won’t be able to avoid the closure conversation forever.
“This will get harder and uglier from here,” Stevens said.
Several board members pointed to steadily dropping enrollment at Pleasant View for getting behind its closure.
Had all the schools been shuttered, it would have been the largest closure of learning institutions in Jefferson County in recent memory and that fact attracted an audience of hundreds who spent hours testifying about their neighborhood schools and stayed through midnight to see how the board would vote.
“Please don’t treat our children as bodies that can be shipped from school to school,” said Jessica Keene, an Arvada resident who pleaded for the future of Peck Elementary.
Keene was one of hundreds who wore different colored T-shirts representing the various schools that have fallen into the district’s crosshairs. They stood in unison each time a speaker representing their school took to the lectern. The crowd was so substantial Thursday that a couple of overfill rooms were opened, and sheriff’s deputies let people into the district’s headquarters building by ones and twos as the meeting got underway.
Nick Rubino, an art teacher at Peck, told the board that the community that surrounds the school on Carr Street is more than just the building that houses 332 students each school day. At 51 years old, it is the youngest of the schools being considered for the wrecking ball.
Rubino hit on a familiar theme expressed in the board room Thursday — his neighborhood school represents more than just collections of students and teachers; it represents family.
“Consider what breaking up our family would do,” he said.
Thursday’s discussions were fueled by November’s election results, in which a $535 million bond issue and a $33 million mill levy override were defeated soundly by voters. The impact of those no votes: Jefferson County has to reallocate more than $20 million in the 86,000-student district’s $700 million annual budget if it wants to keep teacher and staff salaries on an upward trend.
District staff members determined that the budgetary reallocation would hit the five aging elementary schools, which have an average collective age of nearly 56 years. They would be closed before the start of the next school year.
Tim Reed, executive director of facilities and construction for the Jefferson County School District, said closing the buildings would save $3.5 million a year. The district actually has lots of excess capacity — a total of 13,000 unused seats — but that capacity is not distributed evenly among the district’s 155 schools, he said.
Reed said the schools under discussion were chosen expressly because nearby elementary schools have the space to absorb the displaced students. The district doesn’t expect the closures will increase classroom size, he said, largely because affected teachers “stay with the students.”
“There is a lot of capacity in the proposed (receiving) schools,” he said, although he noted that modular classrooms likely would have to be added to schools in the neighborhoods of Swanson and Stober to accommodate the influx.
Reed said only three schools have closed in Jefferson County in the past 15 years, so five schools slated for mothballs is no small matter. The decision to home in on the five was done with deliberation, he said, taking into account building age, condition and cost of maintenance, among other factors. But Reed was not surprised by the energy and organization that have been put into efforts to save the neighborhood schools.
“I appreciate the passion and truly understand it, but my responsibility is to really do what’s best for the facilities,” he said. “The buildings just get older; they don’t necessarily get better. It’s not like wine.”
But Stephanie Schooley, president of the PTA at Stober, said in an interview with The Denver Post that the district hasn’t been as transparent as it could be in choosing schools for closure. Stober, she said, should be getting more money to improve its aging bones rather than being targeted for shutdown.
“It’s not just, ‘Don’t close us down,'” Schooley said. “It’s ‘Invest in this school.’ They need to invest in a school that is working — and Stober is working.”
She also noted that trust between the district and the community has been strained in the wake of the decision by the board last year not to close 12 schools, although that decision was made months before voters rejected the bond and mill levy measures.
In addition to the teachers and parents who took to the microphone Thursday, state Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, who represents Arvada at the Capitol, made a plea for Peck and Swanson. Serving on the Senate Education Committee, Zenzinger said she was used to watching continuously diminished education funding at the state level “tear at” the learning experiences of Colorado students.
“When schools leave, neighborhoods empty out,” Zenzinger said. “Leaving our students stranded is never a choice.”