This commentary is by Ty Haney and Katie Wolf, parents and members of the Flatirons Elementary School community.
A neighborhood elementary school is more than a building where kids learn to read. It is the beating heart of a neighborhood.
It is where children walk to school in the morning. Where parents meet one another. Where friendships form among families who live blocks apart. It is a playground, a gathering place and an anchor connecting generations of neighbors.
Closing a neighborhood school is like ripping the heart out of a neighborhood.
The Boulder Valley School District recently proposed closing four neighborhood elementary schools in response to declining enrollment. In doing so, the district is asking us to accept a simple premise: Enrollment is declining, so neighborhood schools must close.
Under BVSD’s Aug. 25 proposal, the district would close Birch, Douglass, Mesa and Flatirons elementary schools. District officials say consolidation would reduce empty seats and give schools a fuller complement of teachers, counselors and programs. But closing schools is not the only way to achieve those goals.
Declining enrollment is real, but school closures are not inevitable. They are a policy choice.
That doesn’t mean there is nothing to fix. Smaller schools can cost more per student, and uneven enrollment makes it harder to distribute teachers, specialists and programs equitably. But before the school board makes a decision this disruptive and irreversible, we should ask a more fundamental question: Have we exhausted less destructive ways to adapt?
Start with the district’s own cost structure.
Our analysis of BVSD budgets over the last decade found that central administrative costs grew about 50% while enrollment declined about 10%. If the district has fewer students but substantially more bureaucracy, closing neighborhood schools should not be the first or only answer to the resulting financial pressure.
The proposed closures also need to be put in perspective. BVSD estimates the district would save approximately $3.5 million to $4 million annually, a small fraction of its overall budget, while one-time facility modifications could cost up to $10 million, plus transition costs. That’s very little savings for a lot of community heartbreak.
We’ve been down this road before. BVSD closed multiple schools in 2003. The district has never publicly disclosed to the community how much those closures saved. During an Aug. 31 livestream, however, Superintendent Rob Anderson said that, more than 20 years later, the district is still hearing about the fallout.
This isn’t unique to Boulder. A recent Stanford University study found that school closures rarely bring the savings districts expect, especially when closures prompt students to leave the district entirely.
There is another lever BVSD can pull: the enrollment system itself.
BVSD doesn’t simply send every child to the closest school. Neighborhood boundaries, open enrollment, focus programs and other policies influence where students go. The distribution of students among our schools isn’t purely an act of nature. It is something we designed.
And what we designed, we can redesign.
If one school is overcrowded while another nearby neighborhood school has empty seats, we can redraw boundaries. We can reform open enrollment. We can place attractive programs in under-enrolled schools. We can change how choice interacts with neighborhood enrollment. We can intentionally distribute students and resources more effectively across the district.
These options involve tradeoffs. But so does closing a school.
Declining enrollment requires change. Pretending otherwise won’t help our children, teachers or taxpayers. But change does not automatically mean closure.
Before permanently removing the hearts of our neighborhoods, the district should show the community how the alternatives compare with the closure plan. What happens if we reduce administrative growth? What happens if we reform enrollment policies? Could a combination of approaches preserve neighborhood schools while addressing the district’s resource constraints?
Those scenarios should be modeled publicly and compared with closures in terms of finances, educational outcomes, transportation, community impact and long-term flexibility.
Only then can the community understand the actual choices in front of us.
The most dangerous idea in this debate is that we have no choice at all.
We do.
Closing neighborhood schools is a choice. Before we make it, we’re asking BVSD to delay the vote and prove it is the best one.
