Closing SF’s small schools repeats past mistakes
At meetings stretching on for hours, anguished parents beg school board members not to close their neighborhood schools. They explain that the savings from closing the schools are uncertain and that the costs imposed on students will be huge.
This was Santa Fe in the spring of 2010, when the school board voted to close Alvord, Kaune and Larragoite elementary schools.
Seven years later, here we are again. The Santa Fe superintendent and school board have announced a rushed timetable to vote on whether to close E.J. Martinez and Francis X. Nava elementary schools, with a final decision coming May 2.
The justification for closing the schools is to help reduce a shortfall in the district’s $100 million-plus budget. State funding has been cut by $63,000 for the coming year and increasing costs for items like employee health insurance mean that the district needs to find about $1.78 million for the coming year.
In its initial reporting of that shortfall, however, the school district inflated the number to over $9 million, based on unfounded speculation about possible future actions that the state might take. The $1.78 million number is based on the actual budget passed by the Legislature and signed into law by the governor. The inflated numbers seemed like an attempt to scare and stampede the community and the board into making the unpopular and unwise decision to close schools.
But this time around, the board has the example of what happened in 2010 and hopefully they will learn from that experience and make a better decision.
Students suffered when Alvord, Kaune and Larragoite were closed. For example, the percentage of students who were proficient in reading in the fifth grade at those three schools ranged from 52.4 percent to 70 percent in the year before they were closed. In the subsequent years, reading proficiency for the fifth grade at the much larger school where those students were consolidated has ranged between 25 percent and 41.5 percent, a substantial decline.
Think New Mexico has been studying the issue of school size since 2008, when we published a report detailing the many advantages of smaller schools. The research shows that students from disadvantaged backgrounds demonstrate greater student achievement and perform significantly better in smaller schools.
Alvord, Kaune and Larragoite served a population in which 77 percent of the students were eligible for free and reduced-cost lunch. At E.J. Martinez and Nava elementary schools, those numbers are 68.5 percent and 100 percent, respectively.
Based on the research, the optimal size for an elementary or middle school is 400 or fewer students. If E.J. Martinez and Nava are closed, 12 of the district’s 18 elementary and K-8 schools will be larger than this, some of them twice as large. Cramming more students into oversized, overcrowded schools raises questions about whether the school district will be failing to meet its constitutional requirement of providing an adequate education to all of its students.
Rather than undermining the learning environment for Santa Fe’s students, we hope the board will take a hard look at other alternatives for cost savings. How much is the district currently spending on outside contractors, employee overtime, public relations and lobbyists? How many central office administrators staff the district and what are they paid?
Board members would be wise to listen to their predecessor, Frank Montaño, who was a member of the 2010 school board that voted to close Alvord, Kaune and Larragoite elementary schools. He testified at last Tuesday’s board meeting that he regretted his decision, telling the board: “I hope you don’t make the same mistake I made.”