001Good evening, Adams 12 community, and thank you for joining us tonight for this important community conversation around declining enrollment and thriving schools. We thank you all for taking time out of your evening to join us for this conversation, and uh we encourage your uh participation throughout this evening. My name is Bo Foard, and I have the pleasure of serving Adams 12 as deputy superintendent, and I'm joined tonight uh for this webinar by our superintendent Chris Gdowski, our chief communications officer Joe Ferdani, and our planning manager Michael Batello. The four of us look forward to bringing you through this uh presentation tonight, and before we begin, we want to make sure all of you can access tonight's information. So, if you need uh to access this presentation in Spanish, we encourage you to click on the
002globe icon at the bottom of your screen. You may need to click the more button to find that icon, and then you can click your preferred language. We also want to let you know that tonight's uh webinar will have interactive uh components, and you'll have a an opportunity to participate in a couple polls throughout the night, and to offer uh questions that we uh will answer as many as we can at the end of the presentation, and you can submit those questions at any time throughout the presentation by clicking on the Q&A button that can also be found on your screen. So, without any further ado, we're going to get started uh with tonight's presentation, and I'm going to turn it over uh to our superintendent Chris Gdowski. Thanks so much, Bo, and thanks to
003all of you who are online joining us for tonight's discussion. It's a discussion really that I've struggled to come to grips with for quite a while. As a student growing up here in the '70s and '80s, I was accustomed to a a system that we were often having boundary changes year after year. Many students attended two or three different elementary schools during that section. We had split sessions. We were building new schools every year, and even 10 years ago, when we went out to our community and asked for investments in the 2016 bond program, we had significant crowding at a variety of our schools that required us to add additions, to build a new school, to make a variety of changes to create more capacity for students in our system. But, over the last 5
004years in particular, things have started rapidly change for us, and we now find ourselves in a spot similar to many districts throughout our region and the country that you've likely read about who've had to confront declining enrollment in recent years, and to make the difficult decision to close schools. So, I appreciate you coming here for this important topic to share more of your perspective about key criteria that should be weighed by us and by our board of education as we move forward. We really look forward to sharing more with you about this problem tonight. So, Bo, back to you about our agenda. Thank you, Chris. So, here's what we plan to cover with you over the next hour. We're going to be sharing some background and some information and context around declining enrollment. Uh we'll
005share some specific ways in in which it's impacting us in the Five Star district. We'll talk about what we believe is our path forward to ensure we have thriving schools that are also uh maximizing our resources uh through uh consolidations, and then we do plan to have time at the end to take as many questions as possible uh before our time is up. And with that, we're going to get started uh with some interactive uh opportunities right now, and to launch that, I'm going to hand it over to Joe. Thank you very much, Bo, and uh thank you for everyone that's joined this evening. Uh we are going to uh allow everyone to get familiar with the technology. You should see uh on your screen now a question about uh just who's in the room
006this evening. So, uh we're wondering if you're a parent or guardian, staff member, a student, uh community member without a student enrolled in the district, just anything that applies, please go ahead and um choose those selections, and it looks like we've already got uh uh 130 responses. So, we'll give this um about 10 more seconds, and then uh we'll end the poll and and share the results. Okay, let's uh go ahead and share the results. We have uh roughly 73% of everyone joining us this evening uh is a parent or guardian, 44% staff member. We have a couple students uh who are also joining us this evening, and then about 6% who are community members without a student enrolled in the district. So, now we'll go ahead and um hear a little bit from Michael
007Batello just uh as far as some background on what we're experiencing here in the Five Star district, as well as across the state in terms of declining enrollment. Good evening, everyone. Just want to start out by stressing that as Chris already pointed out, that this issue is not unique to us. It's being faced by virtually all of the school districts in Colorado to a certain extent. Um also want to point out that our list of bullets up here is not by any means exhaustive. It's a very complicated issue, and there are many factors at play. These are some of what we feel are the primary driving factors, and we'll go through those now. So, low birth rates. These are pretty indicative of low and declining population growth, and Colorado's actually lagging behind the national average
008currently, and so we're feeling that a little bit more acutely here even than elsewhere in the country. We've also seen a reduction to state and national migration. We have an aging population, which ties directly to this graphic that we have on screen here. This comes from the state demographer's office, and shows the distribution of um our population broken out by cohort. So, if you focus in on that dark blue band for a moment, those are our 0 to 18-year-olds, or the individuals that we would expect to be enrolled in K-12 education. That population is projected to actively decline for the next 10 or so years. It may rebound a little bit by 2040, but not by a significant margin, and it's expected to basically remain static for the foreseeable future. Now, the flip side of
009that, if we look at the orange bar at the top there, our largest population by far is a 65 and over community. Um and that's a rapidly aging cohort shown here. So, this just points out sort of the disparity between those age groups and the fact that we don't have all that many children and younger individuals in our system. Moving on to the rest of our bullets here, we are facing issues with high cost of living. We all feel that pretty acutely in various ways. And then, housing market challenges. We have the obvious things where we're talking about, you know, the rates of um of rent and the cost of purchasing a home, but there's also something that's pretty important to this equation called aging in place, and that's essentially um how neighborhoods turn over,
010and the fact they're not doing so in the way they used to anymore. It used to be that the common cycle was that a young family would um move into an area, look for an affordable house, stay there until their children were of age to move out, and then at that point in time, they might consider either downsizing or maybe moving into something they perceive perceive as an upgrade, and they would free up that {quote} affordable house. But, that's just not happening the way that it used to anymore. The housing market being what it is, mortgage rates being what they are, more and more people are electing to stay and age in place in their um their starter home, essentially, and it's locking up what used to be those traditional uh traditionally more affordable houses,
011and it's just one more barrier to entry in terms of allowing younger families get a foothold in the system, set up shop, and actually raise their families and bring their children here. So, again, by no means an exhaustive list, but some those are some of the complexities that we're dealing with currently. So, what does this look like in terms of actual enrollment numbers? What we have on screen here now is a 12-year enrollment trend. Um we have historical data going back to 2018. We have this year's October count called out in red there, and then 5 years of projected data from 2026 on through 2030. We can see that back in 2018, we were over 35,000 students. We had that sharp decline 2020 during the peak COVID era there, where we lost about 2,000 students,
012and we've been on the decline since then. And our next largest decline was just this past year. We lost about 1,400 students, and that's due to basically all the issues that we just talked about on the previous slide coming to a head simultaneously. And if we look towards the projected enrollment segment here, we could lose as many as another 2,000 students by 2030 if current enrollment trends hold. So, we don't have to to spend too much time looking at this chart before we can start to sort of visualize what this looks like in terms of enrollment in our schools. Um obviously, we have excess capacity. We're talking about having lost something in the neighborhood of 6,000 students since 2018. So, we're at a point in time where we need to start thinking about how to
013meaningfully and responsibly address that excess capacity to make sure that our remaining facilities are able to serve students the best of their capability. So, looking at this at a more granular level now, let's break it down by elementary, K-8, middle, and high school. So, in terms of elementary, our district has the capacity to serve over 15,000 K-5 students. As of October count this year, we're serving serving nearly 10,600. That means we have about 4,800 open K-5 seats, and then we're operating at around 69% utilization in the elementary space. Moving on to our K-8s, this obviously looks quite different than the last slide, but there are some important caveats to get out when we're talking about our K-8s. So, we have four of these in our system. Only one of those is a traditional boundary school.
014The other three are magnets, STEM Launch being a sort of neighborhood magnet hybrid, but it's important to note that those three schools are 100% choice, and STEM Lab and Hulstrom, the other the two other K-8s, typically have a pretty extensive wait list. So, it definitely inflates those enrollment numbers more than what we tend to see in our standard K-5 and comprehensive middle school offerings. All that is to say that we have about 3,000 K-8 seats, and we're operating around 90% utilization in that space. Moving on to our comprehensive middles, we can see that this looks pretty similar to our elementaries, but even a little bit smaller of a utilization. So, we have around 8,700 middle school seats, and we currently have just over 5,200 middle school students enrolled. That means we're operating about 60% utilization
015rate. And there are some important One important thing to note is that um most of our middle schools were built during a time when we were rapidly growing. So, it's important thing to consider. Um they're quite large in terms of middle schools compared to what you might see elsewhere in the state and in neighboring school districts. We're just seeing that disparity more and more as time goes on. The fact that those are such large facilities and we just don't have as many students as we used to. And then rounding things out with high school here, we can see that we're in a relatively healthy space currently. We have the capability to serve about 10,500 high school students. As of October count this year, we're serving just over 9,000. Means that we have about 85% utilization
016rate with 1,500 or so open seats. But it is really important to, as we look at this, think back to our elementary and middle school slides. Those smaller class sizes are going to work their way up through the system naturally. This chart will probably look pretty significantly different in as little as two to five years time. Thank you, Michael. Obviously, as you look through those capacity challenges, the two that stand out most acutely for us here in Adams 12 are at the elementary and middle school level, where we have about 30 and 40% excess capacity at each of those respective levels, and that's starting to really impact the experience for both students and staff in our buildings. What you see here is a representation of at the elementary level of how many classrooms per grade
017level we've had in Adams 12 going back to around 2018 and projected forward. We've done a lot of work with our extended community to really develop what is a thriving elementary school. What is the just right number of rounds to have at a grade level for you to have a robust and complete experience at elementary school, and we found that number to be right around three rounds, where you have three sections of kindergarten, three sections of first grade, and so on up through fifth grade. As you can see in the not too distant past, three-round schools were far and away the most common variety across our system. But over the last several years, you can see we've had a pretty significant decline in the number of three-round and four-round classrooms throughout Adams 12, and a
018pretty significant increase in two-round classrooms throughout Adams 12. And just like Michael shared, kind of these accelerated decreases in enrollment, we've seen this shift from three-round and four-round classrooms to two-round classrooms at many of our elementary schools. And projecting forward, we're only a couple years out at our current pace of having more two-round classrooms than three-round classrooms in Adams 12. And what that means as we start to get into those lower enrollment situations where we have a predominance of two rounds in a school versus three rounds at grade levels, it starts to have some really negative aspects on the experience for students and staff. One thing several of our schools have felt right now that are smaller in overall enrollment is having to share specials teachers. These are teachers that provide music, art, and PE
019programming to students along with computer science. In an effort to maximize resources and make sure that we're providing efficient and equitable experiences to students, we have had to specials teachers cover two schools, which is not ideal for those teachers and certainly not ideal for those students to not have those embedded full-time in their school. This size of two rounds has a limit on collaboration. When you only have one partner to collaborate with or only two classrooms in which to assign students, that has limitations on just how much you can plan together and how much you can provide different experiences to students. The smaller you are, the more limited and part-time support becomes. Academic interventionists support kids who need extra help with math and reading, instructional coaches who develop the planning capacity of teachers, social-emotional learning
020specialists or SELs that support kids with perseverance, grit, conflict resolution, and family outreach liaisons, which are key community connectors to our families. Smaller schools also mean more limited after-school activities. We rely on teachers to provide extracurricular activities for kids, and when you have fewer teachers in a building, you have fewer opportunities for kids to engage in those opportunities, and many times the same teachers are raising their hand again and again to provide those extra opportunities, and that has a diminishing impact over time. And then when a school becomes so small that we can't generate enough interest for before-and-after school care, we can't provide as much of that programming at those schools. Obviously, it's a very different situation when you have three full rounds or four rounds at a grade level. Those specials teachers are full-time
021and fully embedded in the schools. There's plenty of opportunities for teacher collaboration, plenty of opportunities for students to be spread out through multiple classrooms. We have ample dedicated support staff and a much more robust offering of extracurricular after-school activities and opportunities for families to seek before-and-after school care. >> [gasps] >> Very similar but slightly different application at the middle school level. When we get to the middle school level, obviously, we don't have rounds of classes. Students switch periods between different subject areas, but the correlation of that round is quite similar when you think about core content areas of English, math, science, and social studies. A thriving middle school typically has three teachers that teach each of those subjects at all three grade levels, which is represented in that graphic here at the bottom. If you
022run that math up, you get to a range of around 800 to 1,100 students. That's not to say if you're a little below 800 or a little above 1,100, you wouldn't still be thriving, but that is the sweet spot for a thriving middle school. So, when you slip below that or well below that 800 number, again, you have a diminishing or a diminished experience for kids. You're going to have fewer elective, club, and after-school opportunities because there's fewer staff again available to provide those and provide supervision for those. You're going to have less academic course offerings and variety, especially in the elective areas where you have fewer kids and therefore fewer teachers to provide a more differentiated palette of elective offerings. We have teachers that often have to cover multiple grade levels or multiple courses.
023So, they might be teaching sixth, seventh, and eighth grade social studies, or they might be teaching an elective class and a core content class. That's difficult for planning purposes, and it's difficult, obviously, for providing a robust experience for the students that interact with multiple teachers. And again, just like at the elementary level, you have difficulty sustaining especially full-time in-building support roles, mental health providers, deans, social-emotional learning specialists. When you get to that thriving level, obviously, you have a really strong and diverse elective offerings, much more elective course offerings and different times in which students can take them throughout the day. You have teachers that can stay within their content area, stay within their grade level, and have a a more uh specific planning uh and grading and teaching load. And you'll have a complete and
024often uh completely embedded in the building uh support staff, mental health providers, deans, social emotional learning specialists. Very simple way that we describe that is when you get to a point where you're under those thriving uh thresholds, you have fewer students, which ultimately means fewer dollars for the school budget, and fewer staff uh with that are uh able to be um utilized with that budget. And that means really tough decisions about reducing opportunities for kids, asking teachers to do more and more often, uh and and uh making it difficult for us at the district level to provide equitable experience to throughout schools. Have we have to adjust resources to make sure that lower enrolled schools are not um doing without essential opportunities for kids. So, our path forward as a district has to be ensuring
025we address this to make sure no matter where you attend school, you have a thriving school experience. So, our guiding principles as we move into that thriving is to make sure we have enrollment thresholds that provide adequate staffing, adequate teacher collaboration, robust student programming, and full-time specials and electives and wrap-around teachers. We want robust programming uh that ensures academic excess and high-quality student and family experience. We want a strong sense and a vibrant sense of community where there's lots of opportunities beyond the school day for students. And we want to make sure we use our resources efficiently and we maximize them so that every student uh has access and every staff member has access uh to a thriving school experience. So, that brings us to our next poll question, and I'm going to throw it
026back over to Joe. Thank you, Bo. So, you're going to see a poll uh pop up on your screen. We would just like to know, we've talked a lot about the different values in a thriving school experience. We'd like to know which one you value most. More after-school activities, full-time staff, such as specials teachers, social social emotional learning specialists, academic interventionists, uh robust teacher collaboration, more elective course offerings, such as world languages, the arts, PE, CTE, and then finally uh teachers teaching uh one grade level or subject, and then there's one last uh option, before and after-school child care. So, we'll give you uh a few more seconds here to answer that question. We still have some uh responses coming in. We'll wait maybe uh 10 more seconds here and then close the poll. All
027right, let's go ahead and end the poll, and the results uh I'll just share with you. More after-school activities uh was about 2%. Full-time staff was uh the overwhelming choice between all of these at 62%. Teacher collaboration at 5%, more elective course offerings at 20%. Teachers teaching one grade level or subject at 9%, and then before and after-school child care at 1%. All right, thank you for uh sharing your thoughts on that piece. And now uh Superintendent Gadowski, I turn it over to you to talk a little bit about your conversations with our Board of Education on consolidations. Thanks, Joe. As we get near the end, there's a slide that will talk a lot about our timeline and next steps that we'll be taking on this process. One of the important steps uh is yet
028to come, but it's coming soon. Our Board of Education is going to adopt a policy setting up criteria for us to use in making recommendations to them this fall about schools that should be closed and consolidated. >> [gasps] >> They've had a first reading of a a draft policy a few weeks ago. There's a possibility that they'll make some changes, give them feedback received tonight and other uh input that they receive over the next weeks ahead. But the current draft looks at factors like ongoing cost savings. And I'll just say in that space that we know from other districts that have closed schools that ballpark uh an elementary school closing often results in about a million-dollar cost savings, middle school cost savings probably more in the two million-dollar or so range. But the board doesn't
029just simply want us to achieve cost savings. They also want us to maintain or improve learning opportunities for students. So, there's a balance between being efficient and economizing, but also not having kids go backwards in their learning experience at school. There's a strong interest in making sure that families have enough time to explore where they might be assigned next, and if that's not satisfactory to go through our open enrollment choice process. We also want our staff to have adequate time to look at employment at other schools in the in the district. And so, that's a key consideration in terms of timing. There's a really strong desire to try to minimize how much we fragment schools. So, we'd like to avoid students moving from one school and going to three or four other schools when we
030can. Trying to have them all go to a single school is ideal, and that's a a criterion that the board is chewing on right now. There's a desire that we have kids living close to their schools and maintaining neighborhoods intact and not fragmenting neighborhoods and having one part of a neighborhood go to school X and the other side of the street going to school Y. We'd like these changes to be more enduring than some of the changes I talked about in my intro. The '70s, we were making uh school boundary changes, school assignment changes annually in many cases. There's a desire that if we move families and students to a new school that that's intended uh to be something that will last for five years or longer. None of us have perfect vision to the
031future, but that's a strong desire is to not have students and families playing a game of constant change in the years ahead. We'd like students to be able to go to a school that in terms of our state accountability system, which currently gives schools at elementary and middle schools four different ratings, turnaround, priority improvement, improvement, and performance. We'd like students to go to a school that's performing in a similar or stronger manner to what they are now. We do have schools that move up and down between ratings each year, and their their scores within categories sometimes move. So, we'll have to look at trends over time to see which schools are are compatible with or in some cases provide greater academic opportunities for students as they make a change. We want to make sure that
032students have more opportunities in these transitions. I've talked with some other groups, some committees about that the goal for the future is to improve quality of the school experience while we're shrinking down some of the quantity of options that we have right now that have become too expensive. And then finally, we want to be mindful about the void that we might be creating in some of our neighborhoods by closing a school, and we want to minimize those impacts. We want to be very thoughtful in trying to find community compatible uses that take the place of schools if we can't repurpose them for some other need that we have. Okay, now we'd like to uh give your thoughts on some of that uh criteria that uh Chris outlined in the draft board policy. So, we've got
033another poll for you. When evaluating consolidation options, what is most important to consider? Ongoing cost savings, expanded learning opportunities, proximity of a new school which would receive more students, uh minimizing movement from one school to multiple schools, keeping neighborhoods together, or finally the academic rating of the uh new school or the receiving school. Answers continue to come in, and so we'll uh wait another 10 to 15 seconds here as uh everyone is able to make their selection. As I look at the results that are continuing to come in, it's um there is a lot of spread between um the different answers, and so we'll go ahead and end the poll. Uh as you can see, ongoing cost savings represents 6%. Uh, expanded learning opportunities is 23%. Proximity of new school 14%. Minimizing movement from one
034to multiple schools at 20%. Keeping neighborhoods together at 15%. Uh, and then finally the academic grading of a new school at 21%. All right. Now we will um finish this portion of the presentation just with uh Chris if you want to outline our timeline and next steps in this process. Yeah, thanks Joe. We've been working on evaluating possibilities and options and looking at lots of data for several months now dating back to the start of the year. It's a very complicated process as you look at current enrollment projecting future enrollment. So there's lots of data about birth rates and housing starts and new housing etc. that we look at. We're considering things like academic ratings of schools and where might we have compatible [clears throat] mixes of between schools. You want to make sure that
035the boundaries that you have ideally work well not just at elementary if you're making change there but at middle school There's transportation implications for some of these closures where you might have to bus students who haven't been bus before. So there's been a whole lot of data analysis and lots of twists and turns in the analysis thus far. We certainly aren't in a spot where we have any certain ideas about which schools are going to be on the final list. We've also been sharing more information similar to what we've done here tonight with our principals, with folks who have leadership roles at the district office to support schools. We've been meeting with committees like our long range planning and advisory committee to bring them up to date. Our board of education's been in the mix
036both as a group and in individual conversations as part of regular updates. And then recently we've been meeting with leaders in our municipalities about these upcoming changes. I think you'll see us on the road at some city council meetings starting with Broomfield here in a couple of weeks and then meetings this summer in Thornton, Northglenn and Westminster. Those meetings, that input, that discussion of what's going on and then some further meetings to look at data and look at the implications will intensify over the course of the summer and as we come back in August we really expect to have um fairly certain ideas about what we're going to recommend to the board in September which you see is when the decision making part of this process starts. We want to be in a spot where
037ideally we're making recommendations to the board in September. The board is taking action sometime in October uh to identify the schools that will in fact be closed, consolidated, repurposed and then move into the stage where we can support families and staff in that transition process. Doing tours of any school that you might be assigned to, sharing information about the choice process so that people know all the options that they have um as we go through this big change in their lives and making sure that staff know how we're going to support them in trying to find a new job for the following year. And then in the end I think you see on here all of this would go into effect at the start of the 27-28 school year. Okay, at this at this point
038we're going to move into question and answers and we've had several participants share a few questions for for the panel and so we will just start uh Bo with this question that was asked in terms of when we talk about a thriving school environment at the elementary level, what data was used to decide that three round classes per grade level is the desired number. Sure, appreciate that question. The work that was done around thriving schools was actually done about three or four years ago as we were working on our blueprint plan which informed our 2024 bond work and our 2025 mill levy override. And so we engaged a lot of community members but especially our long range planning committee on going out and visiting several elementary schools, looking at school budgets and really determined that
039when a school had three rounds at each grade level the enrollment reached a point where several positive things happened. You had sufficient enrollment to support full-time specials in all three of the core special areas that we have which include music, art and PE. That was the right threshold to have one if not two academic interventionists fully embedded in the building to support students who needed extra help with reading and math. That also was the sweet spot in really having enough total teachers in the building to really have sufficient staff who were willing to host before and after school clubs for students to participate in different leadership roles in the building and to make sure that you had sufficient enrollment to support a before and after school program for families who are interested in it. So
040it really was born out of a lot of school visits with that group, some studying of different school budgets where there were three rounds, four rounds, two rounds and then the impacts on on what that enrollment actually provided in terms of staffing and programmatic opportunities for students at those schools. And a follow-up to that question Bo, we received a lot of questions about class size and just is there a relationship between class size and the number of rounds? And that some of the questions are as we increase enrollment at schools through consolidations, is that going to make class sizes go higher? So if you can just talk a little bit about if there's a correlation or not between the number of rounds and class sizes. Sure. I think there's a there's a it's a great
041question and there's an understandable I think misconception that under enrolled or a lower enrolled school means smaller class sizes and it's actually more common than not that the opposite is true and I'll try to give a concrete example of that. At an elementary school that has two rounds, let's just call it third grade and they have um 58 students enrolled in third grade and that is a most likely a two round school and you're going to be looking at class sizes there of 28 each where you might have another school that has three rounds that has let's go ahead and call it 75 students total and they have three rounds of 25 each cuz they've just crossed that threshold where three rounds actually is going to fit perfectly in that 25 where it's difficult in
042that other direction to have class sizes that would be under 20 across three rounds. So we typically see the higher class sizes at the two round schools because they haven't reached that sweet spot of crossing over to three rounds. The question about when we consolidate, much of the work that we're engaged in right now as we think about consolidation is looking at situations where we get we move away from those on the cusp class sizes and we get to ones that are what we think are the ideal where we have class sizes right around that 25 student range. And so as we project different consolidations we're very much looking at do we move away from situations where we're closer to 30 and by looking at consolidations of smaller schools do we get to a place
043where we get closer to that mid-20s. So that's definitely a factor that we're looking at and we certainly aren't contemplating consolidations that move us into a place where class sizes get beyond thresholds that we think are reasonable. Uh, Chris we uh got a question just in terms of timing and uh while we've seen declining enrollment for several years, why is now the necessary time to consider consolidations? Yeah, I would say there's a number of factors that are driving that urgency for us now. There were some interests that I and others had in recent years to see what were the impacts of things like immigration because we did see a number of schools that had a significant uptick in enrollment a couple years ago. If that trend continued a lot of schools that have been small
044are projected to otherwise be small wouldn't be small. >> [sighs and gasps] >> So when I get a handle on that, we now believe that um migration will be a net reduction as opposed to a net increase and so that's a variable that we feel more confident about now. >> [gasps] >> A second factor is that the pace of enrollment declines had mitigated a few to a significant degree after that 2020-21 school year that Michael talked about where we had over 2,000 student decline in the midst of the most intense part of the pandemic. After that year, enrollment declines had started to moderate into the 300 to 500 per student students per year range. But this year we declined by nearly 1,400 students as Michael said. Next year we expect another 800 students to decline.
045Um So we see that pace picking up and growing more significant. And at the same time we see more and more schools as a third factor that are now well short of the thriving standards that we've identified for elementary and middle school. We see more and more schools that are sub 275 at the elementary level, which is often uh the place that we've seen other districts make closure decisions. At the middle school level we have many schools or at least several schools that are well off their peak. We had uh middle schools back in 2016 that were getting close to 1,400 students at Rocky Top and many of them that were 1,000 plus. And now we have many schools that are well short of that 800 student bottom line piece that Bo talked about in
046terms of being a thriving school. So it's all of those factors as well as the recognition that we're investing pretty heavily in some of these smaller schools, in many cases still to provide a sub-optimal experience as we talked about uh in those criteria today. And we have schools elsewhere in the system who say, "We're not getting all of what we need either." So we feel like through consolidation we've now hit a breaking point that by some closure and consolidation decisions we're going to be able to serve kids much better than we have by more efficiently using our resources in schools of a a greater size. And as a follow-up to that, there um there's been a question or two about budget as that relates to to consolidations or not. Um we know that uh a
047report last year that um the legislature had commissioned showed that um where the state is three to four billion behind in adequate funding for schools. Um so is this a are consolidations a solution to some of the budget challenges or is that not necessarily the the case? Yes, I would say closure is not a solution to the budget challenges that all of the districts in Colorado face. It's a way to cope with the budget challenges to some degree. For each student that we enroll in Adams 12 this year, we receive about $12,000. And the state is transitioning into different ways of funding school districts that have declining enrollment. That's true of more than 150 of the 178 districts in the state. So most of us are declining, and because so many of us are declining,
048they're changing the way they fund us. And so when you're declining rapidly, it used to be that you didn't lose a lot of the $12,000 per student in the first year. That's now accelerating. And so one of the things that closure and consolidation allows you to do is to cope with changes in school funding policy, changes in how the state funds declining enrollment districts. And ideally when we do it our best, give kids still a better experience in a in a new school setting as opposed to just stretching our dollars so thin that the pain you alluded to in terms of a system that's poorly funded and has been a [clears throat] not objectively speaking for a long time, this will help us provide a better experience in a poorly funded system. Thank you. Uh
049Bo, we got a question about um related to preschool and uh the question talks about preschool offerings have expanded in the district and now being offered at at many elementary schools. Uh and the question is with the intake of more students in a school uh through consolidations to to really get to that thriving three round at each level, the question is will there still be room for preschool? I'm glad preschool's come up for sure, and we've we're we're pleased that we've been able to increase our preschool capacity. And as we've been uh working through this process of thinking through closures and consolidation, uh not only are we committed to maintaining uh the seats we currently offer for preschool, we actually want to continue to expand them. And so as we've been going through this process,
050uh although there may be some occasions where we have to move those preschool seats from one school to another, uh the total number of seats we offer uh is is going to not only maintain but increase as we go uh through this time. If there's been any silver lining to the uh declining enrollment in recent years in many of our schools, it's been uh the ability to open up uh some classrooms for preschool. And as Michael showed with the uh continued uh projected declines, uh we expect to continue to offer preschool seats uh to those that are interested. And Bo, we have uh another question related to rounds that not all schools are solely two rounds at every grade level or solely three rounds at every grade level, but lots of times there's a mix
051of two rounds at a couple grade levels and three at other grade levels. How How does that relate to a thriving school experience and get considered in this consolidation process? Sure. Obviously it's it's quite common uh when you look at that graph around rounds right now for you to uh encounter schools in our system that have both two and three rounds. And obviously when you look at some of the projections that have been made going forward, uh we're probably going to see uh an increase in the number of two rounds versus three rounds. I think what Chris shared earlier in his comments around that 275 250 total uh enrollment range, that's when you start to see a tipping point for seeing more two round than three round um grade levels in a school. And so
052uh three rounds or more K5 is the thriving um and it doesn't mean that the minute you go and have one grade level at two rounds that you're no longer thriving, um but when you do get to that sub 275 or around 250 range, you tend to have more two round than three rounds, and that's when you see a diminishing return on those thriving experiences. And Chris, we have a a question about just um criteria being used to uh evaluate uh whether a school will be closed and consolidated and and the question asks if we're prioritizing closing schools that um have older buildings and systems that that need the most maintenance work. Um and just all the different factors that might be uh looked at in terms of what schools might be considered for consolidation.
053Yeah, great question, Joe. That is one of the factors, the facility condition. How is it now? Um How adaptable might it be for another use either for us or for a community partner? How much investment do we expect we're going to need to make in it over the next uh 5 to 10 years? So those are very relevant factors in addition to all the other things I talked about. We look at things like transportation costs because they can be considerable. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Um Do you have access, physical access, to transport students to another school? What impacts will it have on traffic in a neighborhood? There's a long list of criteria beyond the big ones that are in board policy that are absolutely part of the mix for us. And there um there
054have also been um a number of questions about repurposing the school buildings that close. Um Can you talk a little bit about what that process uh would look like and um how uh repurposing may help the school district or the overall community. Sure. So I think the first level is to look at potential uses that we as a school district have so that if we might have a space need um for programs that are married together right now in ineffective marriages, could we move those programs and give them more space in a different building so that it would thrive and flourish more effectively? >> [gasps] >> So those are our first order uh looks is is there something that we can use a building for that still provides a meaningful service and uses the building
055wisely. A second place to look is to see if our municipalities have some sort of community use that they would like to make of a facility for recreation purposes, as a community gathering spot, to provide other programming. That's part of the reason why we're starting to reach out to our cities recently is to get them thinking about needs they may have or wants they may have that would be responsive to communities and neighborhoods cuz that would be a great second use. Beyond that, um there are some uses that we uh were wanting to explore because we feel like they could be compatible with neighborhood issues and might not be disruptive to communities like a child care use, for example. If we vacate an elementary school, is there a private or public child care provider who
056might want to occupy that space and provide care for birth to five or to preschoolers or after school care? Those are the kinds of things that we hope will all be able to land in our schools. And that's work that we'll probably accelerate after we announce the closures because you have to be really concrete about specifically where a space might be open before some of those prospective users come out and say this is where I want to be, but we are setting the the table right now to make sure that we can identify new uses quickly and have uses that will be very compatible with existing neighborhood configurations. Chris, we also have a question about what models have been considered that would allow the the district to be more elastic in its ability to shrink
057or grow depending on demographic shifts over the next uh you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Yeah, there's a lot of variables out there that may impact how many students we're serving in the future, um including these demographic trends that Michael outlined before. As Michael noted that the trend for at least the next 10 years is fairly persistent decline and then really stabilization. There's not a prediction of a re-acceleration to the growth that we've experienced over most of the 75 years of our existence. Because we are shrinking at a significant rate and that's expected to happen over the next 10 years, we expect that we're going to have adequate capacity that if birth rates do turn around, if people come back to Colorado in greater numbers because housing costs and living costs go down, if
058any of those things begin to change, we're not going to be tight in this whole system even after doing some school closures and consolidations. We will have capacity that as things grow, that we can be responsive to that and serve kids in buildings that aren't overcrowded. And then there's another question just in terms of uh what number of consolidations or um potential closures might be considered uh if if there's uh a sense of how many schools were uh are possible at this point. Sure. In our earlier discussions, I think we were often looking at two to three. More recently, we've been talking about five to seven. I think there's an interest in not having school closure and consolidation be an annual event. It's really disruptive to families, to the community, and to our broader school
059district system. So, recently we've been looking at five to seven schools. All right. Um Just let We've uh Just to let the audience know, we've received uh several several questions that um we've we tackled many of them, but um uh we're not going to be able to get to to all of them, but um one of the questions is just uh moving forward, what type of ongoing communication should uh the community expect concerning this topic? Yeah, after our Board of Education lands on the policy language, which we expect will be at either the second meeting in May or the first meeting in June, we'll be communicating out with all of our stakeholders, parents, staff, and community members what those criteria are so they know where that stands. And as people come back in August, we'll
060have an update then about the work we've done over the summer and where we think we're landing in terms of timing of announcing recommendations to the Board of Education and the broader community. So, as you finish, you'll be hearing more about where the board's at in terms of the criteria, and as we come back in August, you'll get an update about the progress we've made in the summer and next steps. And I'll just add for all those who are viewing uh this webinar and listening that um we continue to update the district website and we will include a section with frequently asked questions, many of which you posed this evening that we've been able to answer in our time together and others that we haven't. We'll make sure to get those up on our website
061and uh communicate out to our families and staff where they can find responses to to those questions. So, Chris, I'll just uh as we wrap up this webinar, let you um just share some some final thoughts uh with the audience. Thanks, Joe. First off, I appreciate everyone uh making time for this conversation tonight. It looks like we've been plus 250 in terms of participants here today, and so I appreciate people investing some of their evening to learn more, to ask questions, to give feedback on the polling questions. I'd acknowledge that this is really hard work. It's not something that I ever envisioned I would be doing or making recommendations about. It breaks my heart to think about some of the schools in the system needing to close. Um I have lots of connections and great
062memories with almost every single school in this district as a student or as a staff member. And so, this process is hard for me and I know it's immensely more difficult for those who might be in a school, whether as a student, a staff member, or a parent that ultimately is recommended for and is closed. Our commitment is to do our best work, even though we know it's painful, to support folks um in the getting to a better place. Our strong objective, I hope that you've heard in all these criteria, is to have students in affected schools go to a better place in terms of the overall experience and resources that they have, and as a system, they have more resources that we can invest in quality programming for all in a really scarce financial
063environment in Colorado's K-12. So, thanks for your partnership in this work. Thanks for your input. And um we look forward to communicating with you as we get further down the path in terms of identifying a group of schools that would be on our closure recommendation list. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Uh please uh just know that we will be uh communicating out uh in the coming days a summary of this meeting uh with all our families and staff, and uh we'll continue to share information with you as uh as we continue along this process. Thank you, and have a good