Plan to close schools draws scrutiny from board

“We're not getting all the information”

Denver Public Schools’ plan to close schools next year drew scrutiny from the district’s Board of Education on Thursday. Directors said they are being asked to make a decision in two weeks but haven’t been given enough information on how the district chose which schools to shut down and how the proposal would be implemented.

Colorado’s largest school district has proposed closing 10 schools before the 202324 academic year to combat declining enrollment. The seven-member board will vote Nov. 17 on whether to approve the plan.

Board members acknowledged DPS needs to address declining enrollment, but directors, including board Vice President Auon’tai M. Anderson, Scott Esserman and Charmaine Lindsay, questioned how quickly the district is moving to close schools after announcing the plan only a week ago. The district, they said, also failed to engage adequately with families and employees about the closures.

“If we knew this was coming, we should have just been blunt with it in August,” said Anderson, who had said he would vote against the plan before the meeting. “We should have been doing this in August. We should have been working with communities.”

During the meeting, Director Michelle Quattlebaum became the second board member to oppose the district’s plan.

Superintendent Alex Marrero said the district is moving quickly with the closures because officials believe there would be an exodus of students and employees from schools if the process is drawn out. Under such a scenario, he said, schools would not survive.

District leaders have said they need to close schools because enrollment has fallen significantly and is expected to continue to do so in the coming years because of lower birth rates and high housing costs that are pushing families from the city. And with fewer students comes less money for schools.

They presented their plan to the school board Thursday, providing more insight into the criteria used in its decision. The presentation also showed that the district had decided against recommending four other schools with low enrollment for closure because they did not have another school within two miles that could take their students.

But Esserman said one of the four schools — Ashley Elementary — is less than two miles from Montclair

School of Academics and Enrichment. Under the district’s plan, the latter school would accept K- 5 students from Palmer Elementary, which would close.

“We’re not getting all the information, and that is highly problematic,” Esserman told district leaders.

A district employee responded by saying that two of the schools the district decided against recommending for closure are actually within two miles of other schools but DPS cannot send students from more than two schools to another one. For example, students from Beach Court Elementary, which is not recommended for closure but has low enrollment, could have gone to Trevista at Horace Mann. But instead, Columbian Elementary would close and students would go to Trevista under the district’s plan.

“Part of my frustration right now is that we, as a board, are not being listened to,” Esserman said. “We’re not getting the information we need to make the decisions you are asking us to make.”

Some directors questioned whether there was another way DPS could tackle declining enrollment and school closures that involved the community. They did not settle on a path forward, but some suggested whether they should revoke a resolution passed in 2021 by the previous board that tells the district to work with school communities to address low enrollment in elementary schools.

Directors said the plan was rolled out as if it had been approved, but questions remain about how things such as transportation will be implemented. They also criticized the way the district revealed its plan and what they said was a lack of engagement with the community. Families and employees found out their schools were closing via press releases and news reports, directors said.

Anderson and Lindsay said the district held meetings with families after the plan was announced but school board members were given little notice about the gatherings. Lindsay, who represents northwest Denver, noted how five of the schools — half of the schools recommended for closure — are in her district. The community, she said, “feel as though they had almost no representation.”

The district held meetings at the schools with families and employees, but Lindsay said she was unable to make all of them because they were all held within a matter of days.

“There’s a lot of trust that’s been lost by the way this was implemented in the beginning,” Lindsay told district leaders.