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By Melanie Asmar/Chalkbeat
How many seats are filled and whether the neighborhood is experiencing declining enrollment are the first two criteria that Denver Public Schools staff will consider when deciding which schools should be recommended for closure.
That’s according to a methodology released Monday night, a week and a half before Superintendent Alex Marrero is expected to make school closure recommendations on Nov. 7. The school board is set to vote on those recommendations two weeks later, on Nov. 21.
District officials have not indicated how many schools will be closed or consolidated. The board directed Marrero to close schools to address declining enrollment. Although DPS enrollment is up 2 percent this year due to an influx of migrant students, officials said the bump is not enough to offset yearslong downward trends. DPS has about 90,000 students this year.
In an interview, officials declined to reveal specifics about the methodology for fear that communities would try to guess which schools will be recommended for closure before the list is announced.
For instance, Andrew Huber, the district‘s executive director of enrollment and campus planning, did not say how few of a school’s seats would need to be filled for the school to meet the closure criteria. But he said a healthy building utilization rate would be between 85% and 100% of seats filled.
“The criteria that we are fashioning to advance schools [for a closure recommendation] is well below that level,” Huber said. “We’re planning on being proactively transparent with the data that is underlying each step of this methodology when we bring forward the recommendations so that people can follow our logic and our thinking.”
Once the district identifies schools with more seats than students that are located in regions with declining enrollment, it will group those schools together in clusters, officials said. The clusters will be made up of schools that are near each other and not separated by “hazardous roads” that would be difficult for students to cross on their way to and from school.
Within those clusters, the district will look at several more factors to determine which schools should be recommended for closure, officials said. The factors will include:
- The enrollment at each of the schools.
- How many students who live in each school’s boundary “choice out” to attend other schools through the district’s yearly school choice process.
- How many students who live in other boundaries “choice in” to each school.
- What programs are available at each school, including for students learning English and students with disabilities.
- The quality of each school building, including whether it has air conditioning and enough space to accommodate more students.
- Each school’s academic performance.
The methodology is an attempt to approach school closure recommendations more holistically rather than base the recommendations largely on whether a school has low enrollment, said Laney Shaler, senior advisor for the district’s schools office.
“This methodology allows us to bring in … additional data points, drawing from lessons learned over the past years, to really build a data-informed set of recommendations,” she said.
Denver has approached school closures differently in the past
DPS has used different methodologies in the past to close schools — and for different reasons.
In 2015, the school board adopted a policy called the School Performance Compact. It was driven not by declining enrollment but by a desire to boost student test scores. The policy called for DPS to close schools with a history of low ratings, low scores on the most recent state tests, and low marks from a committee that visited the school to see if it was on the right track.
The school board used that policy to close one school, Gilpin Montessori, and “restart” two others with new programming. But the process was rocky, and after significant pushback from the community, the board backed away from the policy in 2018.
In 2021, declining enrollment prompted the school board to pass a new resolution directing the superintendent to engage with parents, educators, and neighbors to come up with options for reducing the number of under-enrolled schools in the district.
A committee recommended several criteria based primarily on enrollment, including that schools with 215 students or fewer should be considered for closure.
In the fall of 2022, Marrero recommended 10 schools that fit that criteria for closure. But the school board rejected his recommendation, even after Marrero whittled the list from 10 schools down to two. The board complained of a rushed process, and it rescinded the resolution directing the superintendent to address declining enrollment.
In the spring of 2023, Marrero returned to the board with another recommendation to close those same two under-enrolled schools, plus one more. The board quickly agreed. Fairview Elementary, Math and Science Leadership Academy, and Denver Discovery School closed just a few months later at the end of the 2022-23 school year.
In the 2023-24 school year, DPS enrolled thousands of new immigrant students from Venezuela and other South American countries, boosting the district’s enrollment.
Although that boost has carried into this school year, the district is projecting enrollment will eventually drop 8% by 2028. Four months ago, in June, the board adopted a new school closure policy called Executive Limitation 18. That’s the policy Marrero will rely on to make his school closure recommendations on Nov. 7.
EL 18, as it’s known, frames the school closure decisions as financial. Colorado schools are funded per-student, and schools with fewer students have less money to pay for things like mental health staff, art and music teachers, and extracurricular programs.
Over the past month, the district held a series of six regional meetings to make the case for why school closures are necessary. Still, this year’s process has been criticized by parents, advocacy groups, and former school board members as rushed and lacking transparency — the same complaints that have dogged Denver’s school closure decisions for years.
Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at [email protected] .
