Middle schools projected to be half-empty in 10 years

Enrollment projections cited by a school demographer Monday night for Colorado Springs School District 11 showed that the district's middle schools would be nearly half-empty and elementary and high schools would be at about 70 percent capacity in 10 years if all the buildings remain open.

The presentation to a sparse group was a glimpse of a report that is due to the D-11 school board on Nov. 5. That report will include various scenarios for closing schools, restructuring grade levels in buildings and finding alternative uses for school buildings, said Shannon Bingham of Western Demographics Inc. His firm is working with Lantz-Boggio Architects P.C. under a $124,960 contract to prepare the report and make recommendations to the board.

"The Nov. 5 report will be school-specific," Bingham told the group at one of three public meetings scheduled this week. The presentation at Mitchell High School included slides on demographic projections, trends in student migration into and out of D-11 and information on national education trends such as high schools that focus on specific career paths.

District administrators, consultants and school board members seemed to outnumber the handful of community members who showed up for the information session.

Jan Rivera, the grandmother of a Longfellow Elementary School student, made a plea to keep that school open. The school was one of two elementaries that the D-11 administration suggested closing last spring because of declining enrollment and poor test scores. Rivera said the school had "failed her granddaughter" and she moved her to another school, but then came back and found things had changed. Now, she said, the staff works hard to help children succeed.

"You build a bigger school, you can make it beautiful and there's still going to be cracks" for children to fall through, she said, in response to Bingham's suggestion that the district's old schools might need to be razed and the students consolidated into new schools that are built for today's education. He cited a Grand Junction project that did that and said everyone has been happy with the result.

Former school board member Lyman Kaiser asked a number of questions about how programs would be consolidated if schools are closed and warned: "Don't close schools when you should be changing staff."

He also challenged Bingham's assertion, based on national research, that moving low-performing student bodies into higher performing schools improves achievement.

In District 11, Kaiser said, specialized programs such as the International Baccalaureate program were put into lower performing schools and were successful at improving achievement.

Bingham said the district's schools are being measured on utilization, physical condition, financing and performance.

Among the projections:

• The district will have 20 schools, 14 of them elementary schools, with fewer than 200 students in five years. In general it costs an average of $1,800 more per student to run a building with fewer than 200 students.

• Enrollment has been declining for eight years and is likely to continue to do so. He predicted the district will lose an additional 1,300 students by 2013, and 2,600 by 2018.

• The district is losing more students who choose to attend school in surrounding districts. The number who lived in the district but attended school elsewhere in 2003 was 1,886. Last year the number was 3,494.

• Elementary schools are at 81 percent capacity now, and are projected to be at 77 percent in five years and 73 percent in 10 years.

• Middle schools are at 64 percent capacity now, and are projected to be at 61 percent in five years and 54 percent in 10 years.

• High schools are at 84 percent capacity now, and are projected to be at 77 percent in five years and 70 percent in 10 years.

Bingham said small schools can be beneficial for students, but the key is to balance the size with financial efficiency. A reasonable enrollment range nationally is 300-400 students in an elementary school, 500-600 students in a middle school and 900-1,000 students in a high school, he said. He also said most schools run at capacities in the high 80 percents.

Former school board member and minority community activist Norvell Simpson questioned what outreach work had been done on the benefits of having schools as anchors in neighborhoods.

"Usually, you close schools in the neighborhoods where the families need more support."

"The people with the nice homes and the nice schools say, ‘Send them to us,'" Simpson said, urging the researchers to go out to the minority and poor neighborhoods and talk to residents about schools.

"Too often the report comes out before the work goes in," he said. "And those people lose the anchor of their neighborhood school."