AURORA | Aurora Public Schools superintendent Rico Munn and several members of the school board provided the Aurora City Council with an update on Blueprint APS at its Monday night study session.
Some city council members said they were hesitant about plans to close numerous schools and avoid running smaller schools.
The plan has been a source of frustration for APS families and teachers for the past several months, following the announcement that the district plans to close Sable Elementary School due to low enrollment.
Blueprint APS is the district’s long-range facilities plan, which has been in development for several years after the former plan expired in 2017. The new plan is attempting to adapt to declining enrollment in the district, in particular on the west side of the city.
“We needed this new facilities plan to fit our new reality,” board president Debbie Gerkin told the city council.
The school board will vote later this month on the next phase of the plan, which includes closing Sable and Paris elementary schools and establishing a magnet school focused on health on the campus of North Middle School. It will also include space for a P-TECH program, a six-year program beginning in ninth grade that allows students to graduate with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree, along with experience and connections in the workforce.
The recommendation to shutter Sable Elementary School has been controversial since it was not on the original list of schools under consideration for closure. Sable families and teachers have strongly opposed the plan and spoken out against it at the past several school board meetings.
APS has lost about 3,600 students in the past five years, board member Anne Keke told the city council.
Declining birth rates and more students enrolling their students in schools outside the district are both contributing factors, Munn said. Currently about 14% of students within APS boundaries attend non-district schools.
Those factors have caused the number of schools with low enrollments to double over the past three years. Schools with low enrollment have smaller budgets and are not able to offer students all the same services as large schools, Keke said, creating inequities within the district.
Several council members asked questions about the value of smaller schools, to which district officials responded that low-enrollment is less likely to lead to smaller class sizes than it is to a lack of resources.
“Smaller schools don’t always mean the best for our students,” Keke said. “Because of budget issues we have to pull out resources because it takes a lot of money to run those buildings.”
Councilmember Crystal Murillo said that a number of constituents have reached out to her with concerns with school closures in her district, particularly with the support offered to schools once a closure is announced.
Keke said the district is trying to keep teachers who work at schools scheduled to be closed.
“It’s not, ‘the school is closing, bye,’” she said. “It’s, ‘what can we do to keep you and maybe have you work in a different building.”
Murillo said she continues to be concerned.
“I am just hearing a different narrative from boots on the ground, from the actual teachers, from the actual students,” she said.
Councilmember Alison Coombs said that she wanted to make sure the P-TECH program won’t end up funneling students of color and low income students away from pursuing college, which Gerkin said that the district is cognizant of.
Mayor Mike Coffman thanked the school board for its work, and commented on how the city has changed over the years.
“When I grew up in the city all those homes in northwest Aurora were young families…when we look at the new areas it tends to be all over again young families,” he said. “So we have to shift resources accordingly.”
The school board meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 22 at the APS professional learning and conference center at 15771 E. First Ave. Meetings are also streamed online at boe.aurorak12.org/live.
Maybe kids should attend the district their are in instead of being transported by their families miles away draining another schools resources
Maybe kids should be homeschooled and avoid the Marxist indoctrination camps.
The APS BOE Meeting will be on Tuesday March 22 at 6:00pm. Not the 15 th at 7:00pm.
The private sector particularly sensitive to maintaining cost of operations also had buildings that had excess space not being fully utilized during the pandemic. To deal with maintaining some form of business footprint in the communities, the businesses figured out how to close down and mothball selected areas of their buildings. While this maybe a little inconvenient and not just perfect for the proposed school blueprint Sable school is no different. It needs to have some reduction reconfiguration, not shuttered. To now bring into the mix to make students spend excess time to be bused all over, is in conflict to the basic theory of keeping kids in the school classroom. With this, it’s going to be we need more buses, and more buses , more CDL drivers by the way ( no one has looked at the new reality of transporting kids) this is pretty clear. A kid misses the bus , he will blow off class, A kid walking to school, is just late.
These folks and their “blueprint” No. Time to go back to the drawing board, there is to many defects in their modernization plan.