Mike DeGuire questions some of the work going into decisions about closing schools in Denver.
Closing schools does not necessarily save money for school districts. The DPS bond committee included nearly $12 million in the upcoming bond issue to cover the cost of “expenses related to school closure and consolidation.” This potential bond money isn’t referenced on the closing schools’ section of the website. While this $12 million may address some potential closure needs, Jefferson County spent more than $45 million on upgrades to schools taking in students from the 16 elementary schools that closed at the end of last school year.
At the same time DPS is planning to close an unknown number of schools, they are asking Denver voters to approve a $975 million bond issue. When asked by Channel 7 news what will happen to those schools scheduled to receive improvements if they end up being on the closing list, Scott Pribble, DPS communications director stated, “improvements to closed buildings will still be made since the district doesn’t plan on selling them.” He also said that they could use the bond money wherever it was needed.
There are other examples of this “transparency gap” in the DPS’ school closure process. During the community meetings, DPS staff often shared misleading or incomplete data. As an example, one of the slides showed a graph stating that lower enrolled schools have a “64% higher cost, on average, to educate students at schools with fewer students.” They described this as a “resource disparity” in which the “average per student funding for schools with 0-215 enrollment was $16,724, and for all other schools they listed $10,207” as the average amount.
However, a document received from the enrollment director shows that the schools designated as part of the “lower enrolled group of 13 schools” included several schools with unusually high per pupil costs. Robert F. Smith Academy and the Denver School of Sustainable Design were grouped with nine neighborhood schools, and the per pupil allocations for their schools were $61,507 and $27,071 respectively. In addition, that same slide stated, in very small print, that the enrollment information does not refer to “ECE students, center or pathways schools, or reserve funding.”
The district staff presented another slide with research citations indicating that enrolment is declining across the country, explaining that this challenge is not unique to DPS. At the Oct. 28 meeting, the enrollment director stressed that “lower birth rates” are the primary reason for these declines. Yet the research cited on the district slide, which was not discussed, only listed, emphasized another significant factor: the growth of charter schools nationally.
One of the research citations listed “public school” enrollment as declining nationally, but DPS staff left out the data for “charter school enrollment” from the same citation. The charter school enrollment data reported that “Between school years 2010–11 and 2021–22, the number of public charter schools in the United States increased from approximately 5,300 to 7,800. Meanwhile, the number of traditional public schools decreased from 93,500 to 91,400. Three of the other listed citations also cited the impacts of charter school increases on district enrollments. “The promotion of charter schools through the “school choice system” in urban areas like DPS often occurred by falsely labeling many public schools as failures, and helped to create this national scenario.
