Proud and loud to the end
A victim of budget cuts, north Phoenix school closes its doors after 33 years
The noise levels in the big hall swelled with the energy of the last day before summer vacation. Jan Stevens waited, listened, then raised her hand for the last time as principal of Village Vista Elementary School.
“Village Vista!” she called out, and the response was immediate and deafening.
“Vikings!” the students yelled. And then she had their attention.
“It has been an amazing journey we’ve had here at Village Vista,” Stevens said, composed again after an emotional few minutes when the students rewarded her seven years of service with a standing ovation.
She waited again. “Thank you for being part of it.”
Near the back of the hall, Monica Williams scanned her class of fourth-graders, 9- and 10-year-olds squirming on the floor as they tried to maintain the “crisscross, applesauce” sitting formation. In a few minutes, she would give a similar speech.
For the past five months, Williams and the other teachers at Village Vista had worked with the principal to maintain daily learning routines, to keep grades high, to meet expectations, a phrase used often at the school. Now, on a warm May Thursday morning, those teachers would help write the final lines of the school’s 33-year history.
In December, the Paradise Valley Unified School District voted to close Village Vista as part of a plan to address a $13 million budget deficit. Enrollment at the school had fallen by nearly 70 percent from a decade earlier. Efforts to revive the numbers had failed.
So in the fall, many of the Village Vista Vikings will become Thunderbirds at Indian Bend Elementary, two miles away on Thunderbird Road and 36th Street in northeast Phoenix, a merger the district said would more efficiently use resources.
The story of a school’s final days has played out over and over across Phoenix and Arizona in recent years, as districts from Flagstaff to Tempe to Tucson confront declining enrollment in aging neighborhoods and shrinking state aid. Each year, districts are forced to shut down schools, many with deep community ties, and with each closed door, a few traditions die.
Williams, who has taught at the school for 27 years, will move to Indian Bend along with almost all the other teachers. She has tried to encourage her class to see the value in change.
“The chapter here might be ending, but we will go on to a new chapter,” Williams said. “It will be a new beginning.”
Standing on the stage as the last school assembly wound down, Stevens invited the student council to lead classmates in the school cheer for a final time. They all knew the routine. It began in hushed voices:
“We are Village Vista, we couldn’t be prouder …
“If you can’t hear us, we’ll yell a little louder.”
Overflowing with students
Village Vista opened in 1980, in the midst of the northeast Phoenix area’s rapid development. Paradise Valley Mall had opened two years before, the jewel of a master-planned community called Paradise Valley Village. More shops and, with them, new houses and apartment complexes cropped up.
The school sits at the end of a cul-desac, next to Sweetwater Park, a popular spot for dog walkers in the morning and a calming buffer between the mall and other busy streets. The building sprawls low and wide at the far corner of the greenbelt. Near the main entrance, a small courtyard gives students space to gather and wait until the first bell.
In its heyday, Village Vista overflowed, with five or six full classrooms for each grade level.
“We were just shy of 1,000 (students),” said Donna Morrison, who moved to Arizona 23 years ago into a house a half-mile away from the school, one where she still lives. On her first day there, Morrison brought her oldest son to enroll at Village Vista and remembers a school so full that portable classrooms took up a hefty portion of the playground area.
The school district continued to grow, as new families hopscotched north across Greenway and Bell roads, closer to the newly completed Loop 101. But around Village Vista, the neighborhood grew up. When the economy faltered, families came and went. The portable classrooms disappeared.
“There’s just been a lot of changes,” Morrison said.
Five years ago, the housing market crashed, and the subsequent recession drove out more families. By the end, enrollment was just over 325 students.
Making new friends
Every morning, at 8:45 a.m., Monica Williams navigated the hallways and walked to the back entrance of the school, where her 24 students waited. On this Friday, as soon as she opened the door, the sounds of the students burst through. Some ran to hug her; others began blurting out weekend plans. She shepherded them all, at various levels of fourth-grade highs and lows — skipping, dragging their feet, chattering, miffed about selective birthday-party invites, laughing — inside her classroom.
“Stop and freeze!” Williams said calmly. “The noise level is high, high, high!”
On a raised music stand, she checked her lesson plans for the day: “Friendly Letters.” For weeks, her students had been exchanging letters with fourthgraders and future classmates at Indian Bend. A packet of letters had arrived a few days ago, and today her students would be writing back.
Some letters were measured in their familiarity.
“Dear Derek, Thank you for writing back to me. ... I have 3 cat at my dad’s and 1 dog at my dad’s. and my mom’s We have two cat’s and no dogs. my dog’s name is G. my cat’s name are ninja, bob, angel, FluFy, Oero. I love cats and dogs. Howold are you I forget. From, Brennon.
Other pen pals had already declared each other BFFs — best friends forever.
“Dear Laylah, Guess what! I’m going to Indian Bend next year! I hope we are in the same class. Don’t you? … Laylah I want to tell you that you’re a good friend.”
Williams’ students finally met their pen pals on Monday of the last week of school. Buses took the whole school (except for the sixth-graders, who will move on to other schools) to Indian Bend. After a brief question-and-answer session (“Our mascot is the Thunderbird.” “Yes, we have book fairs.”), the students toured the main building.
The Village Vista fourth-graders crowded into Mrs. Marks’ fourth-grade classroom and watched eagerly as the students, until that moment just names and descriptions, introduced themselves.
Candidate for closure
Paradise Valley is one of the largest districts in Arizona, but the recession and collapse of the housing market hit hard. From 2007-12, the district lost $23.8 million in state funding and faced a $13.4 million structural-budget deficit. The district in 2010 singled out four schools operating “significantly below” capacity. Among them was Village Vista, which became a candidate for closure.
In an attempt to boost student numbers, the school added arts and reading programs and sent teachers on recruiting trips around the neighborhood, taking advantage of the state’s open-enrollment rules that allow parents to send children to any public school with enough classroom space.
In fall 2012, a series of public meetings to discuss the proposed closures drew hundreds of parents, students, teachers and residents for hours of public comment. Village Vista supporters attended, often clad in “Viking blue.”
But on Dec. 20, the governing board voted to close two schools, Village Vista and Foothills Elementary. Both would remain open through the end of the 2012-13 school year. The weightiness of the issue lingered over the Horizon High School auditorium with every somber “aye” vote of the board meeting.
“I could debate both sides for hours — literally for hours,” said board member Nancy Case, whose children attended Village Vista. Case said she worried that if the schools did not merge now, there would be other cuts required elsewhere. Closing each elementary school was projected to save the district about $500,000 a year.
“I’m not just a school-board member for these four schools. I’m a school-board member for 33,000 students, and I have to look at all those things,” Case said.
For now, the district will house its growing online education program in the Village Vista building, but will also consider selling the school.
Sense of normalcy
Rare is the quiet moment inside Principal Jan Stevens’ office, but once the morning announcements are done, there is time she can take stock of the day. On a recent morning, Stevens hoisted a black Avery binder onto her desk and flipped through pages stuffed into the front pocket. There were handwritten tasks for the extra custodian the school hired to help pack and clean, and lists upon lists of things to get done.
“Every morning I wake up and I go, ‘Oh my goodness,’ ” Stevens said. “What do I need to do today?”
Stevens has been a principal for 14 years, seven of them at Village Vista, and she will become principal of the newly merged Indian Bend school. Overseeing the move, she said, has been one of the biggest challenges of her career. But she’s determined to maintain a sense of normalcy for the students. She has told teachers: No packing in front of the students.
“We didn’t want the walls stripped while the kids are still here,” Stevens said.
She flipped through the dividers in the binder, through LABS, ASSIGNMENTS, SCHEDULING, MAPS. She arrived at a packet of notebook paper, full of handwritten notes in which she and the Indian Bend principal, Dr. Ibi Haghighat, meticulously documented every classroom a Village Vista teacher would be moving into. Room 43 — Large room 2 whiteboards Filing cab - 4 2 Lrg metal cupboards Rolling cart shelves Needs: teacher’s desk Has media cart
The lists went on for 19 pages.
Always in their hearts
In Room 11 at Village Vista, Monica Williams had been packing in fits and starts for weeks, trying to keep the classroom from becoming a daily reminder to the students of what was approaching. But on the last Tuesday of the school year, Williams set aside the worries of moving 27 years of history to a new school and allowed herself to be a mother.
Her daughter Tina was a sixth-grader at Village Vista and, that morning, would join her classmates at a special promotion ceremony, the last group of sixthgraders to graduate from the school. Williams arranged for someone to watch her class and joined the other parents in the multipurpose room.
There, Stevens reminded them of their first meeting, the day in 2005 when she reported to Village Vista as its new principal and the sixth-graders before her entered kindergarten.
“We came in together,” she began, “and we’re going to go out together.”
“I love this school and it hurts to see it close,” Tina Williams said. “I’ll always keep Village Vista in my heart.”
Some of the teachers and alumni had shared similar sentiments a week earlier at an after-school gathering. A steady trickle of cars began turning onto Andora Drive, past the park, and into Village Vista’s parking lot. Soon, cars spilled out into the cul-de-sac and along the side streets. Some drove from Utah, from California, from Tucson, simply to return and pay their respects to the school.
When PE teacher Michael Woolridge took the stage, the applause drowned out everything. Woolridge had helped open the school 33 years ago. Nobody who had ever gone to Village Vista would not know him.
“I imagined …” Woolridge said, before choking up. He stopped to glance around the room, his home away from home, at “Village Vista Vikings” stenciled in large letters on the south side.
“I imagined I would finish my career in these walls,” he finally said, crying. “To say that I’m sad would be an understatement.”
Several in the standing-room-only crowd wept.
“It’s the people. Not the building,” he said, his voice steadier by the end. “We’re going to move on with the Viking pride.”
‘A positive move’
On the last day of classes, Monica Williams’ students bubbled with the excitement of the start of summer break, but the meaning of the day seemed to wash through the classroom. Williams handed out cleaning cloths to scrub down desks.
Bits of conversation exposed the frustration. “Why couldn’t they have closed just Foothills?” one boy groused. “They should have closed another school and merged with us,” said another. Two girls wiped away tears as they signed yearbooks. With no prompting, a few kids quietly picked up markers and wrote messages on the white board: “I’ll miss everyone.” “I love VVES.” “Me too.”
Williams scanned the room, looking for small opportunities to pack. Most of it would wait until the next day, when there would be no students, when the reminders of what was could be separated into orderly stacks and marked for moving. Tonight, Williams would watch her older daughter, Marissa Armstrong, graduate from Paradise Valley High School, another emotion-laden milestone in a week full of them.
At the posted time, the students filed into the multipurpose room for the assembly. There were awards — perfect attendance, math Olympiad, millionword readers — and there were raffles of items with the school’s name that would become collectors’ items for the students.
Finally, the cheer, repeated five times, each with more volume.
“We are Village Vista, we couldn’t be prouder …
“If you can’t hear us, we’ll yell a little louder.”
On the walk back to the classroom, students cried, hugged, exchanged phone numbers. Teachers tried to maintain order, hiding an occasional sniffle.
“Right now I have a feeling of calmness,” Williams said. “I’ve been through different emotional experiences, but I don’t have a fear about this one. I think it will be a positive move.”
“We are Village Vista, we couldn’t be prouder …
“If you can’t hear us, we’ll yell a little louder.”
When the final bell rang, the students filed out of Room 11 and into the front courtyard, where they lingered not waiting for the start of school, but to prolong the end. Teachers gathered for last farewells. Stevens stood among the crowd, accepting and giving hugs, her smile never wavering.
On Monday, the district moving trucks will arrive and begin loading up the boxes and desks and cabinets that will make the trip to Indian Bend Elementary School. By then, the last echoes of the last cheer will have faded.
“We are Village Vista, we couldn’t be prouder …
“If you can’t hear us, we’ll yell a little louder.”