Poudre School District terminates plans to close schools while facing declining enrollment and budget struggles

FORT COLLINS — The Poudre School District is halting plans to begin closing elementary schools in fall 2025 after the school board on Monday night voted unanimously to end a process to decide which elementary schools to shutter and consolidate.

The stunning decision during a special board meeting drew applause from an audience of a few dozen in the district boardroom, with loud cheering from parents, teachers, students and community members trickling in from outside. The board’s decision came an hour after about 350 demonstrators crowded the entrance of the administrative building where the board met to protest school closures. They waved signs that read, “equity first,” “keep your paws off our schools” and “neighborhood schools matter.” And they erupted in chants, at one point shouting, “Save our schools. None have to go.”

Inside, board members took to heart parents’ calls for the board to take more time to determine how to consolidate schools or find the funding to keep them open.

“We have heard you, and it has made a difference,” board member Scott Schoenbauer said before the board vote. “The passion that we have seen in the response from the schools starting in October has been impressive and has made it very clear that the last thing we consider is closing a neighborhood school or any school before we’ve exhausted every other option.”

But the process of figuring out how to educate fewer students across school buildings is a challenge that still needs attention, board members said.

“The message has been clear: Please don’t close our neighborhood school,” director Jim Brokish said before the board vote. “We listened closely to you, and I support stopping the consolidation work. All that said, we will need financial help from the community I believe to make this work.”

The board’s decision reversed a four-month-long process led by a district-convened steering committee that created a series of draft scenarios around closing schools to present to the school board. The most recent draft proposed closing five to six schools, depending on the scenario.

Parents have described the district’s approach in looking at which schools to close and how many as rushed and divisive, with parents organizing to try to save their individual schools.

Along with a Monday afternoon walkout held at Blevins Middle School, parents from Linton Elementary School recently launched an online fundraiser in hopes of collecting $2,500 so that the school community would have funds on hand to make signs, flyers and banners and potentially even hire legal counsel should the board decide to close their school, according to parent Ty Goodwin.

Additionally, community members gathered at a Fort Collins intersection Sunday morning for a demonstration in support of all Poudre schools.

The district of slightly more than 29,900 students in preschool through 12th grade began trying to devise a plan to consolidate schools last fall, with administrators and board leaders pointing to budget struggles largely stemming from declining enrollment.

The Poudre School District is facing the possibility of a 10% drop in student enrollment over the next several years, which would result in a loss of about $40 million in state funding from the district’s $400 million budget, spokesperson Madeline Novey told The Colorado Sun in April.

That translates to about an $8 million deficit per year over the next five years, according to Novey. The district is currently spending $6.6 million per year on supporting schools with lower enrollment and anticipates saving money through closing and consolidating schools as well as by cutting department and school budgets.

But many parents aren’t buying school closures as the best way to save the district money, raising questions about what they deem exorbitant pay increases among Superintendent Brian Kingsley and members of his cabinet.

Board members on Monday night apologized to the community and the steering committee, with board member Kevin Havelda pledging to be more involved in future discussions about how to best balance the district’s declining enrollment and its school facilities.

“I’m sorry that we failed the community,” he said during the two-hour board meeting.

Colorado State Rep. Cathy Kipp, a Fort Collins Democrat, also attended the board meeting and encouraged community members to carry their sense of community organizing forward to broadly advocate for the board to vote to add a mill levy override to the ballot this fall. That would provide another source of funding for the Poudre School District.

“I hope that everybody here and everybody who was out front and everybody who they represent will be helping to make sure that we have that adequate funding for our schools to be the most successful and thriving,” Kipp said.

“Schools are not meant to be efficiency machines”

Beattie Elementary School, which would have closed under all four of the latest proposals, is the root of many of the connections that Hannah Wilbur and her children have made with others in the community. She and her husband intentionally purchased a home near the elementary school, where they wanted their two kids to learn beside classmates from a diversity of backgrounds.