NOREEN: D-11 school closures are long overdue

The Colorado Springs School District 11 board is about to make a long overdue school closure decision that's going to hurt.

It will hurt some families and some neighborhoods. It will hurt some teachers and it will bring no joy to the board members themselves.

Several elementary schools, a middle school and a high school may be axed when the board meets Feb. 25. If that many schools are closed, many parents have argued, it will hurt neighborhoods.

That's true.

Don Schley, who lives in Ivywild, told the school board Wednesday night that closure of schools will "accelerate the decay of older neighborhoods."

Look at what happened in the old Lowell School neighborhood downtown and it's obvious Schley is absolutely right. But the cold truth is that while the school board must consider such impacts in the city, its top priority is educating kids, not addressing urban blight.

The board must spend its limited money in the most efficient way.

School districts react to growth ­- or in the case, shrinkage ­- they don't cause it. In fact, the exodus of families with children from some D-11 neighborhoods has been occurring for many years and it's been magnified by the emergence of charter schools and Colorado's school choice law.

Some parents asked for delays, charging the process has proceeded too quickly.

That's false.

In the last 12 years D-11 lost 4,500 students while it built six schools and opened 11 charter schools. In the past 10 years, the D-11 school board has pondered school closures four times without ever closing a school. This includes the so-called group of "reformers" who took over the board a few years ago.

Remember Sandy Shakes, Eric Christen, Craig Cox and Willie Breazell? They were swept into office after promises of more accountability and better fiscal management.

They made a lot of noise, but they never closed a school, although it was proposed during their brief reign. The school boards before them similarly lacked the guts to close a school, which always is politically unpopular.

It's analogous to Congress and Social Security. Not wanting to be blamed for the tough measures required to fix the program, each Congress has passed the problem on to the next.

Without changes Social Security will be bankrupt. For D-11, making the tough decisions now is the right thing to do, but the current board members might have to pay for the sins of their predecessors.

There are things the board can do. For instance, it could adopt some creative suggestions from west side parents for how to combine students from Buena Vista, Whittier and Washington schools at the West Building.

Inevitably, the board will anger some people. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.