CENTENNIAL | Among declining enrollment across the district, Cherry Creek schools officials recommended Monday that the district build a new elementary school, a plan that will hinge on whether voters approve bond measure 4B this fall.
The district was planning to build a new elementary school prior to the coronavirus pandemic based on growth in the southeast portion of the district, superintendent Scott Siegfried said during a presentation at the meeting. After the pandemic began, the board asked the district to do another review to determine whether enough growth was still taking place to merit another building.
Cherry Creek, among other metro area districts, has shown declining enrollment, but Siegfried said growth in a Cherry Creek region merits a new, neighborhood school, the foundation of the district’s philosophy.
The proposed site of the new school is in the Blackstone neighborhood in Aurora, which is located near Coyote Hills Elementary School, Altitude Elementary School, Black Forest Elementary School and Pine Ridge Elementary School.
According to the data, the pandemic has not slowed growth in that region, Siegfried said.
Cherry Creek’s elementary schools are built to accommodate 650 students, he said. Based on projections, Altitude and Black Forest will be overenrolled within the next five years and Coyote Hills and Pine Ridge will be at capacity.
Along with building a new school, the district could also decide to bus some students west to smaller schools or shift the existing schools to a four-track calendar, where the school is open all year and students attend class at different times.
Ultimately, the district believes that building a new elementary school is the best choice, Siegfried said. However, that requires voters to pass measure 4B in the upcoming election, which will provide $150 million to the school district for deferred maintenance, the creation of the new school and the development of a mental health treatment center.
The board was provided with the information at Friday’s study session, and board member Kelly Bates said the board agrees that the district should go forward with building a new school.
If the measure does not pass, one of the other options will be selected.
“Building this school does depend on our passing this election,” Bates said.
Siegfried also provided an update on the district’s COVID-19 tracking process at the meeting. At the previous school board meeting, he presented a pilot plan for two new metrics that would be used to track school safety: Rates of positivity for COVID-19 among Cherry Creek staff, and incidence rates among students.
In order for the staff positivity rate metric to have enough data to be valid, the district needed at least 3,300 staff members to get tested every two weeks using its partnership with COVIDCheck Colorado.
However, not enough staff have been getting tested, Siegfried said. During the first two weeks of the pilot there were only 1,855 tests, and 1,887 the second week.
The district plans announce a change to the location of the COVIDCheck testing site in the district to a more central location.
“That certainly doesn’t account for a shortage of 2,000 tests to make this a valid measure,” Siegfried said.
The district is working with the teacher’s association to determine why testing numbers are so low and what it can do to get them back up, he said. Going forward, the district will use staff incident rate as a metric, which is tracked by the district’s contact tracing team.
The student incident rate metric will be lowered slightly, with less than 0.15% being considered a “green” metric instead of 0.25%. That number may seem very small, Siegfried said, but it’s calculated from a total student body of 47,000 students.
The new metrics are now live and can be viewed on the district’s online COVID-19 dashboard.
Overall, 78 students have tested positive for COVID-19 as of Monday morning, along with 28 staff members. Of the 1,119 students and 125 teachers who have had to quarantine, four students and no teachers have tested positive for the virus while in quarantine.
“That’s not causation, it’s correlation, but that tells us COVID is not spreading in schools,” Siegfried said.