Meetings yield little about OKC school closures
A week’s worth of community meetings hosted by Oklahoma City Public Schools yielded plenty of feedback but few details about impending school closures and consolidations.
Many who attended meetings at Star Spencer, Northwest Classen and U.S. Grant High Schools expressed concerns about the future of schools in the district, which is operating at about 60 percent of capacity and faces $11 million in cuts to state aid over the next two years based on projected enrollment declines.
Wilson Elementary School parent Ellen Pogemiller attended Wednesday night’s meeting at U.S Grant in south Oklahoma City, which drew about 80 people.
“I want to ensure that if we make big changes to our district that the trade-ups will actually be worth it,” she said. “I know that we need a full-time counselor, and I think that we would benefit from a speech therapist and a reading specialist.
“At the end of the day, my kindergartner is in a class with 28 children and that’s crazy. If something changes, does that mean my first-grader is in a reasonably sized class with a certified teacher?”
Superintendent Sean McDaniel said the district needs to stop maintaining underenrolled facilities and start serving students equitably by aligning district facilities and resources with instructional needs.
“Are we going to save money? Yes, that is a byproduct of the process,” he said Wednesday night. “But the real reason we’re doing this is so that we can provide bigger, better, more opportunities for our kids. It is a given that we’re going to have to either close or repurpose schools.”
Instead of half-empty classrooms, McDaniel addressed school overcrowding on the city’s south side, offering solutions that included building a new school or adding on to an existing school through a bond election, or redrawing boundary lines.
He also acknowledged the anxiety being felt by teachers and principals who are unsure of their futures.
“If I’m telling you that we’re going to close or repurpose schools next year that means we’re going to have fewer schools, which means we’re going to have fewer head principals,” he said. “So the commitment that I have made to our principals, really this is to all our employees … we want to protect you, we want to protect your employment.”
Several principals attended Wednesday’s meeting, including Capitol Hill High School’s Adam Jewell.
“I do know that there is some anxiety from teachers and principals about where they’re going to be next year,” Jewell said. “We got to focus on our kids no matter what. The bottom line is we have a job to do and that’s all we can concern ourselves with at this point in time.”
Over the next several weeks, teams of educators and community leaders will study data from building assessments and a demographic study and make recommendations related to facilities, bonds and educational offerings.
Additional community meetings — those to present the three best options — will take place in January. In February, McDaniel will present the best option to the school board, which is expected to vote on it in March.
McDaniel assured those who attended the meetings that their input is critical to the success of the district’s Pathways to Greatness project.
“It is a community engagement process,” he said Wednesday. “We cannot get to the right answer at the end of the process without this input.”
Nearly 50 percent of more than 2,200 people who completed a district survey last week said they would be willing to send their child to a larger school than they currently attend if they had greater access to more electives, an expanded curriculum or other educational opportunities.
The survey can be accessed on the district’s website until midnight Monday.