FORT COLLINS — One after another, parents, teachers and even elementary schoolers stepped up to a microphone in the auditorium of Poudre High School on Tuesday evening to voice messages that were sometimes sharp, other times articulated through tears, about widespread fears around plans to close schools.
Their audience: Poudre School District R-1 board members and Superintendent Brian Kingsley, who listened as speakers, many of them clad in “red for ed,” demanded they take more time to decide how to consolidate schools, expressed how central their neighborhood schools have become to their families and accused a panel of leaders of pitting school communities against one another.
Budgets slimmed by declining enrollment are forcing Poudre School District leaders to consider closing schools starting in fall 2025 — a decision that has stirred up anguish and anger among many families whose schools are at risk of shuttering.
Meanwhile, some Fort Collins parents and teachers question the district’s financial priorities after district cabinet members have received pay increases of up to 17%, first reported by The Coloradoan.
“From what we’ve heard at the most recent school board meeting, the finances have been a problem for 10 years and yet you have let the upper administration and cabinet bloat instead of trimming at the top with the least amount of harm to kids,” Alisa Hicks, a teacher at Cache La Poudre Middle School and a parent of two students at Poudre High School and two graduates, told board members and district leaders during a Tuesday evening listening session. “Every choice we’ve been given for cutting the budget has been where kids are directly and adversely affected.”
Like many districts throughout the state, Poudre School District — which has just over 29,900 students in preschool through 12th grade — has been caught in a cycle of declining enrollment mainly stemming from lower birth rates. That downward trend has amplified budget challenges since the state largely distributes funding to districts based on the number of students they educate.
District officials say fewer kids showing up to classrooms has set the stage for smaller classes in the foreseeable future, starting with about 400 fewer kindergarteners this school year — down to about 1,600 students from a typical enrollment of about 2,000. The district currently has about 6,000 open seats across several elementary and middle schools. The district projects its schools could face a 10% decline in student enrollment over the next several years.
“None of us wants to be in this place,” district spokesperson Madeline Novey told The Colorado Sun. “We acknowledge that there is a lot of discomfort in sitting in the unknown and that this is a really difficult process. It’s emotional, and it’s emotional because our families and our communities care deeply about our schools.”
“And the reality is we have not addressed this prior to now as a district because we know it’s so hard,” Novey added.
Data from the state demographer’s office — which analyzes birth data by county — shows that the number of births in Larimer County peaked in 2007, when 3,500 babies were born. The number of annual births in the county has continued to drop since then, hitting a low of 3,025 births in 2021, according to state demographer Elizabeth Garner.
Will the number of births continue shrinking in the future?
“That’s everybody’s question,” Garner said.
However, she expects the number of births in Larimer County to begin rebounding because counties like Larimer County are continuing to grow, with young adults — the age group that tends to have babies — moving in.
Garner predicts that births in Larimer County will hit 4,200 by 2037.
Schools will absorb the impacts of the slowdown in births from the past 17 years, with lower enrollment in the immediate future, she said. The district could easily see lower enrollment through 2030 before it begins to tick upward, Garner said, “but only if we start to see those births creep back up.”
“Migration is an uncertainty, and because that’s an uncertainty, so are the births,” she said.
Garner said the district’s projected 10% drop in enrollment in the coming years could be accurate, but said it’s hard to know because of all the factors at play. Much of how student enrollment shakes out will also depend on what types of homes are built in the area as well as whether families opt for home-schooling, private school or another district.
“These guys work so hard to get it right,” she said. “It is impossible to know for sure.”
First, chaos. Now, collaboration.
As part of its efficiency planning for facilities and staffing, Poudre School District has targeted a need to serve about 350 to 400 kids in each of its elementary schools. Meanwhile, some of its elementary schools educate no more than 250 students, according to Novey.
“They are at risk of not being able to fund specials (like art and physical education) and all of the amazing things above and beyond the core classes,” Novey said. “Those other things are what our community expects and deserves.”
The prospect of dipping 10% in enrollment over the next several years means the district would lose about $40 million in state funding from its $400 million budget, most of which goes toward paying staff, Novey said.
That breaks down to about an $8 million deficit per year over the next five years, she said. 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.
In recent months, four scenarios of closing and consolidating some Poudre schools have been up for debate among a 37-member volunteer facilities planning steering committee as well as parents and community members. Thousands of them have weighed in on the proposals at a series of community listening sessions.
Prior to those scenarios, district leaders last fall encountered serious backlash from students and community members after announcing a school consolidation plan that would have included shuffling students from Polaris Expeditionary Learning School, a K-12 alternative choice school, to other schools beginning during the 2024-25 school year, KUNC reported. The initial plan would have also brought the district’s alternative high schools into the same building and combined all special needs programs.
After students from Polaris Expeditionary Learning School twice walked out of class and school board members heard parent and student criticism of the plans, the district pressed pause and formed a steering committee to look into other possibilities and push out changes to the 2025-26 school year, KUNC reported.
Recognizing that the community felt the process had moved too fast and needed more input from families and community members, the district launched a new process with a steering committee created in January, Novey told The Colorado Sun.
The message from the district: “We heard you, community,” Novey said. “We want you to be a part.”
Poudre School District has also been working with an outside facilitator from Colorado State University’s Institute for the Built Environment, who has analyzed district data, including enrollment, school demographics and budgets, and what percentage of school buildings are full, according to Novey.
The steering committee, which first met in February, is collecting feedback from small groups of attendees at listening sessions and has modified ideas for closing and consolidating schools based on what they have learned at listening sessions and through an online questionnaire on the district’s website.
On Tuesday evening, about 140 parents, teachers and community members lined up in the auditorium of Poudre High School and spent nearly four-and-a-half hours pleading with Kingsley and board members to rethink devising a consolidation plan so swiftly.
The steering committee is expected to present two to three final recommendations for school consolidations to the school board May 28. Board members will analyze those options and gather more feedback, including at a June 4 listening session, before making a final decision during a meeting June 11.
Jade Fung, the parent of a first grader at Polaris Expeditionary Learning School and a sixth grader at charter school Compass Community Collaborative School who previously attended Olander Elementary School, wants district and board leaders to slow down and give the community more time so decisions can be thoughtful.
The scope of work that needs to be completed is too much for the steering committee to tackle “properly in such a short time period,” she told Kingsley and board members Tuesday evening. She said the steering committee “needs accurate, comprehensive data and budget information” that considers all the factors that will be impacted by closing schools, including transportation costs and maintenance of vacant buildings.
Fung also urged the district to consider options beyond simply closing schools.
“Thinking outside the box, how can we preserve the communities throughout this process?” she asked Kingsley and board members. “Can we combine entire schools rather than fracturing communities by sending students from one school to multiple feeder schools at the middle or high school level? Can we merge Charter schools with similarly-structured public schools to fortify district enrollment, as was done in the early days of Polaris? Can we create some K-8 or 6-12 schools?”
Parents and teachers are also raising questions about the district’s budget and how leaders prioritize spending after Kingsley — the superintendent — and top cabinet members have received substantial raises.
Information provided by Poudre School District shows that Kingsley’s base pay this school year is $273,000, up from $243,800 last year. He also earns $77,943 in extra pay, giving him a total compensation of $350,943.
Additionally, cabinet members have received raises to their base salary as high as 17% in the past year. Autumn Aspen, who serves as general counsel for the district, makes a base salary of $163,630 this year, up from $138,995 last year. And Chief of Staff Lauren Hooten takes home a base salary of $178,654 this year, up from $153,840 last year.
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Meanwhile, at least nine cabinet members are receiving more than $50,000 each in extra pay this school year, for things like mileage and advanced degrees.
“The recent actions by Superintendent Kingsley and our elected board of education have led to deep distrust from this community that future actions will be in the best interest of our students,” Tracy Kelley, a teacher at Lopez Elementary School and a parent of a senior at Rocky Mountain High School, told board members and district leaders during the Tuesday night listening session. “Increasing (administrator) salaries … and hiring more than 40 new (administrators) at a yearly cost of well over $4 million are not sensible actions of a district supposedly losing money and students.”
Novey noted that the district increased pay for some cabinet members to get them on par with market pay while some received pay increases to close gender equity gaps. Pay was also adjusted for three staff members who were handling responsibilities of cabinet members but were not being paid as cabinet members, she said.
Additionally, the district doled out an average compensation increase of nearly 10.3% last year, Novey said, and increases for cabinet members were in line with the average compensation boost for other employees.
Still, the district sees why the community has brought forward concerns about district leaders’ pay, she said.
“It is understandable that our community has questions about the pay for members of our cabinet and superintendent when there are budgetary questions regarding the future of our district,” Novey said. “We understand that.”
Fort Collins parents find themselves in “a ‘Hunger Games’ situation”
Parents are also grappling with the possibility of losing much more than school buildings. For some families, their neighborhood schools have become the fulcrum of their communities.
Those schools act as the “central keystone” in neighborhoods, Kevin Dorn, who has one child at Olander Elementary School and another set to start school there next year, told The Colorado Sun earlier this month.
“These are the cultures of their neighborhoods, the values of their neighborhoods,” he said. “What makes this district amazing is that everyone loves their schools. You can’t go wrong in the choice that you might make for your family.”
The beauty of Poudre elementary schools, parents say, lies in how they tie families together as neighbors and friends and in the extra programs they offer kids. Those include a leadership program teaching young learners life skills as well as an International Baccalaureate Program, part of a global program for advanced students.
Dorn, who spoke during Tuesday night’s listening session, attended two other listening sessions this year and heard parents echo one another as they shared stories about how much each school matters to the families it serves.
But some of the conversations are splintering families from different schools.
“We’re kind of in a ‘Hunger Games’ situation where we have to advocate for our school, but in doing so, we’re advocating for our neighbor schools to close,” Christie Fredrickson, whose son is a kindergartener at Lopez Elementary School, told The Colorado Sun in March. “It’s a horrible feeling because all of our schools have different programs and benefits and added treasures that they set into our community.”
Under one scenario, Lopez Elementary School would close and reroute students to three other elementary schools.
Fredrickson, who participated in Tuesday night’s listening session along with a previous listening session that she said drew 400 people, has seen outrage ripple across school communities, with some attendees even tearing up.
“It’s devastating thinking about it because these kids are just now starting to build their communities and their friends at this age,” she said, adding that they’re also “in the very early stages of finding their sense of self.”
Both Fredrickson and Dorn worry about school closures uprooting students from their familiar classroom settings and inciting more stress after the past few years of the pandemic created major uncertainties for kids.
“That further disruption is going to impact them both educationally (and) socially,” Dorn said. “Most of the kids in school right now have already experienced really profound disruptions because of COVID, and trying to minimize that is worth the effort and frankly the financial investment.”