Kevin Havelda and Scott Schoenbauer were never convinced Poudre School District needed to close any of its schools.

Jim Brokish and Conor Duffy realized the community placed as much, if not more, value on its neighborhood schools than cost efficiency.

Kristen Draper and Jessica Zamora were concerned about the increasing inequity low enrollment and the associated reductions in per-pupil funding already are having on PSD schools but were unwilling to make such an important decision without a consensus opinion.

Carolyn Reed grew weary of people, especially those in the most vulnerable communities, telling her their voices weren’t being heard.

For those school board members who hadn’t already made up their minds, the final straw was seeing a list of revised scenarios May 14 that included the closure of as many as three of the district’s four Title I schools. By the time they gathered for a special meeting May 20, all seven members of the PSD Board of Education were convinced they needed to stop a process that was tearing their community apart and voted unanimously to end it.

“There’s no way — from a budgetary, a community, civil, financial, equitable, moral way — that you’re going to close three of the four Title I schools,” Duffy said. “… No matter what their numbers are; that’s not fair. I didn’t seek this seat to pick on marginalized kids.”

All seven members of the school board felt that way at that point, each said in one-on-one conversations with the Coloradoan following that May 20 vote. They each reached that decision in different ways.

Here are some key excerpts from those conversations:

What made you realize this process needed to stop?

Brokish: “For me, the tipping point was the (May 14) board meeting, where many community members proposed paying more to fund under-enrolled schools to avoid closures. Parents were there cheering for a mill levy. It was, we don’t want to close any schools. And not closing any schools, that came up in basically every session we were in, right? And of course that’s what I would love, too. I would love not to close any schools. But in this meeting, there was a shift where folks were, ‘Hey, we can grant you a way out of this, and the way out of this is don’t close any schools and tell us what it costs, and we will find a way to fund that, and we’ll deal with whatever inefficiencies this causes. But don’t close my school.’

“So, I think that meeting was where I kind of started to get to the point of OK, if the community wants to do that, I want to respect that and make that happen. I mean that’s certainly to me the easiest answer. That’s the one I like, too. I would love to shell out a few extra bucks and keep all the schools open. I don’t know if that’s sustainable in the long term — it may not be as enrollment changes — but we have to see what happens there.”

Draper: “I still think we need to do this. I’m one of the few who looks at this and says we’re not done. And yet at the same time, listening to the community, listening to other board members, it became quite clear that this was certainly not going to be a unanimous vote, it probably was not going to be anything but a divided vote, very divided. That was not something the community deserved or would have stood for to be divided like that, it just would have been bad for the district, it would have been bad for the community, it would have been bad for the board, it would have been bad for the staff members.

“So, it became increasingly clear that this was something that we were going to have to rethink our approach, rethink the way we’re doing things.

“And it also became clear that the community was willing to step up and put money towards it and say, ‘Our values are that we want the small schools, we want these things’ … so this will give us an opportunity to see if that will come to fruition.”

More: PSD halted closure plans but is still exploring changes for schools in 2025-26 and beyond

Duffy: “No. 1, on the financial side I think that it will be whatever funding mechanism that we’ve been looking at, and we’ve been looking at it throughout this whole process — whether that’s mill levy, bonds, some kind of mix between them — just from a process standpoint, I think it makes it a lot harder to pass something in the fall if we do consolidation now. Also, if we do have a new funding mechanism in place in the fall, that will change the calculus on our process around consolidation. Hopefully, we can get enough now that we’ve suspended the process or stopped the process. I think a funding mechanism will be able to give us enough runway to do the process better as the community has asked for.

“… Now, going through the process on the other part, the thing that kind of changed my mind drastically is I’ve been to 10 elementary schools and three of four of the middle and high schools, and each time that I’ve gone to one of them or participated in their events, I’ve come to the realization that you cannot distill it down to dollars and cents. There are some things in there that you can’t use financial metrics to quantify.”

Havelda: “I realized, too, if someone didn’t say something soon, that we were going to be forced to make a really bad decision with not a lot of great data — a short runway, and we were just never going to get off, I mean it didn’t feel like the plane was ever going to take off.

“… If I’m the decision-maker and I felt rushed, I know for damn sure that the community was feeling rushed, our community was feeling rushed. To me, I just thought if we’re not there, we’re not there. And if it takes longer, it’s going to take longer, and there’s other things that we can do to bridge that financial gap in the interim, and we need to kind of rethink the problem and how we’re addressing it. … If there was a true breaking point, I think it was probably the first scenarios when the savings weren’t what — that was probably the most surprising thing to me in general was how low the savings were going to be.

“… When I saw Blevins on all scenarios, I saw Linton and I saw Putnam — all three schools I had visited, all three schools I ran to help protect those kids — I said to the assistant super(intendent)s and to bring in Carolyn (Reed), who was also in my two-by-two, I said, ‘Guys, I really appreciate all the hard work, this is unacceptable.’ And I’m not blaming the steering committee. There’s no blame to go around. It’s just that if those were the possibilities, and then we were going to finalize some version of that — and I very much said I appreciate all the hard work — we’re nowhere. I’m voting no, regardless. I’m not closing one of those schools; I’m just not going to do it. We’re punishing people that can’t get out.”

Reed: “We started hearing loud and clear that our community didn’t feel heard, right? And that hurts. And I started feeling like would it be better just to stop, back up, start over with a process that really makes our community feel heard, that’s really well-planned out so we don’t have these last-minute changes right that really frustrate people. … That’s probably the biggest reason for me is I was hearing loud and clear that people just didn’t feel heard, didn’t feel like they had time to be heard. And, you know, coming up with those last minute, coming up with those (revised) scenarios in a really shortened window for comment before a final decision, that started to feel really bad. There were new schools (on the closure list). We got those the day before, so we weren’t too far ahead of how they felt. And I know how I felt. I looked at it and I was like whaaat!”

Schoenbauer: “The exhausting all other options before we talk about closing schools really started to ring true with me. I was like, man, this is really hard. So, I felt like with a $400 million budget, there’s got to be places that we can find savings, and I’ve been on the Budget Advisory Committee before, so I knew a little bit about that.

“Those were areas of concern and then I really started thinking about the impact on the neighborhood schools. … That was a big deal for me. The quality of life in those neighborhoods, too. I think that’s a big thing. The home values, just from a pure financial standpoint, they drop dramatically when you don’t have that there. And then the transportation, what are we going to do getting those kids that normally walk.

“… The listening sessions, as a whole. I went to some of the regular steering committee ones, and then we did our big one. And cumulatively, what we were hearing, it was very clear that we didn’t do a good job of defining the problem, the community wasn’t believing the data at all, and then we weren’t even answering basic questions. So, it was like zero positive feedback and 100% negative feedback, and it just did not feel right. … I’m not here for pleasing everybody, but it was very clear that we were not making an informed, good decision in a timely manner. I never wanted to make a decision just for the sake of matching the timeline that we promised. If it’s going to take longer, it’ll have to take longer.”

Zamora: “We didn’t have a consensus with most of the board, and if we can’t have a consensus, it’s not possible for the community to have a consensus. And seeing the scenarios at the same time, where they really landed on a few schools that were across the board and then a few kind-of options. And what we’ve heard in our community comment overwhelmingly was, ‘You’re targeting Title I schools, you’re targeting inequitable options,’ which was also incredibly accurate, right?

“… And I would argue that’s not the board we have. It’s not who I want to be. I don’t envision that being who anyone on the board wants to be is the inequitable candidate or the inequitable board member. … I didn’t get a sense that we had a clear direction, and I don’t think the community had a sense that we had a clear direction amongst ourselves. … These kinds of votes should be 7-0 in my opinion, and there was no way we were going to get there. And so, if we’re not going to get to, really, I want to say 7-0 period, then we don’t have any business doing it anymore, in which case we can stop.”

Why wasn’t equity a bigger factor in this process?

Draper: “That is something we could have done better, is talk about what equity is and what values each of the board members bring to equity. And even with that, we probably would have narrowed it down to about 30 different versions of equity. It is a hard thing; it’s a hard thing to define. it’s a hard thing to quantify. It’s a little bit of ‘you know it when you see it’ kind of thing.

“… And I think that the other thing we didn’t do a good job of for me personally was talk about the inequities that are currently in the system and why those things need to be changed. So, in talking about equity moving forward, we, or I, neglected to talk about the equity that’s currently in the system and how that is affecting students right now, too. When you look at some of the schools that we’re talking about, they are some of the highest performers, but they’re some of the lowest-enrollment and their capture rate is the lowest, where people are not going to their school. They’re using school of choice (to go elsewhere). And you start looking at those numbers, and you look at poverty levels and then you look beyond that, and you start to see that’s an interesting dynamic that’s happening there, and how do we fix that?

“… I wasn’t ignorant to the inequities that we had systemically. It definitely highlighted them, and it also highlighted the fact that as a community we don’t have any agreement as to what that means and how to even approach changing it.”

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Duffy: “Through this process, it has become evidently clear to me the importance that this community puts on equity. To have a process — and that’s not an indictment against the steering committee that they came up with those schools, because to my understanding within the steering committee, they took the name off the schools and started doing their work without the knowledge of which school it was. And they mixed it all up, and those were the schools based upon what we had given them, and that’s one of the ways that they came up with the list. Well, that’s a great way to do an exercise, but in reality, you’re not going to close three of the four Title I schools; you’re just not.”

Reed: “What I really hated about how this ended up was because of the way we asked the committee to do their work, because our guiding principles, we created inequities. A lot of Title I schools ended up on those lists, because they followed our guiding principles, and we made it a problem for schools that were under-enrolled.

“… I think we need to better define and level set what equity means. … We didn’t do that hard work. And I will say that all of this stuff that happened, like creating these inequitable outcomes, by giving these guiding principles. Looking back, I can really take ownership of that, because I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I should have thought about that,’ Because even when I saw Boulder’s metrics around how they close schools and if we took those metrics and said, ‘Those are great, we’re going to use them here,’ we’d get the same outcome — all Title 1 schools.”

Were the financially optimal enrollments of 400 or more students for an elementary school and 700 or more for a middle or high school appropriate?

Draper: “I feel like 22 students in a classroom is a pretty good number, and that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about 400 in an elementary school. So, I feel like those are good numbers; those are standard across the United States. It’s your optimal number. We could put more kids in there and get more money per school and have more things, but then you do have 26, 27, 28 kids in a classroom, and that’s a lot. If you start going down to 18, you’re starting to having to supplement again a school because you don’t have enough, so I feel like 22 is actually a pretty good, pretty reasonable number.”

Brokish: “Anyone that doesn’t feel that a school with 400 to 500 kids in it can be effective needs to go to Dunn, needs to go to Tavelli. Look at the list of schools that have 400 to 500 kids in them in Fort Collins and go to those schools and talk to some of the parents. I think what you’ll find is that those parents think their kids are getting an awesome education and that the school is just a wonderful school, so I don’t buy that. One of the critics called them factory schools. I find that term offensive. They’re not factory schools; they’re awesome schools, and I think we’ve shown in Fort Collins that we can operate very effectively at that level with great experiences for the kids and in a very efficient manner for the school.”

Schoenbauer: “That also kind of bugged me because the nature of the problem was we’ve got a drop in enrollment, we’ve got this huge budget cut coming up and they are related, but it soon became like the driving decision-maker, I think, with the steering committee was that 400/700 thing. That why we have to do five schools, and it’ll kind of work into these numbers. So, that’s where the ‘what problem were we trying to solve’ question came up. What are we doing here?

“I know, for a fact, that that number does sound good in general; it makes sense, and there are experts who have said that. But there are certain schools where that will not work. … So, I don’t think it fits every school at all. I think it would be good to aspire to that, when it made sense. But it should not be the sole driver of any of these decisions.”

Zamora: “I think that the threshold should probably be a little bit different depending on the school, whether or not they have an integrated services program, an autism-based program, right? Because those classrooms for those programs are never going to be over 20 kids. You can’t fill a school that has these programs to the percentage, right?

“… The schools that are Title 1 schools or substantial free and reduced lunch, let’s look at them differently. They do have additional resources for Title 1 funding but also do we want them to have classes of 25 or do we want to prioritize having classes at 20 or less, and what is our community’s value around that? … We were so focused on the budget and an enrollment of 400/700 that we didn’t grapple really with our community’s values and what they’re willing to sacrifice for their kids for the sake of a kid who has more need. And I do think there’s a large amount of our community that would support saying, ‘My kid’s going to be fine; I will gladly support this school being a little bit smaller because it serves those kids.’ But we didn’t give our community the chance to say that.”

Does this process still need to happen at some point?

Brokish: “Some people, I think, feel that our kindergarten enrollment will turn around soon. I get a lot of that kind of feedback from constituents, and I just don’t believe that. I think we’re in a spot where the high housing prices in our area, the high property prices, are keeping a lot of young families out. And beyond that, the young families that are getting in, they’re just not having as many kids as they used to.

“… The nice thing, I think, about where we’re at is if we get the extra funding to cover us for whatever it is — one, two years — we can watch enrollment over those one to two years and get a better picture of where we’re at. If I’m wrong, and it turns the corner, awesome! I will be one happy camper. If it doesn’t, then we can reevaluate. But I think, in the end, it’s always going to be a choice that the community is going to have to wrestle with of how much funding are we willing to pump into our schools to keep all of our schools open? Because what we heard clearly from the community this round was don’t close any. And as enrollment keeps dropping, and I believe enrollment’s going to keep dropping, that’s going to be harder and harder to take that approach, because the funding need is going to keep going up and up and up. So, that’s a community choice, right?”

Draper: “I know I personally didn’t do a great job of explaining of what the low enrollment, what that means for people — the inequities that we currently have in our system. If there are schools that have 400-plus (students) in elementary, they have the full-time librarian, they have the full-time PE teacher, the full-time art teacher, the full-time music teacher. And it’s not just the art once a week that the kids get, it’s the afterschool programs, it’s the at-lunch programs, it’s the before school; it’s all of those things combined by having those staff members in the building. …There are other schools that have those full-time specials teachers, and there are opportunities there that those kids have because of it that you probably, in a smaller school, you’re not noticing because you don’t have it. So, it’s not like they’re taking anything away. You just haven’t had them, so you don’t see. It’s really hard to see what you’re missing when you’ve never had it. … We still have to address the fact that there are schools that fall below a level at which we can support them.”

Duffy: “I have full faith in our other elected leaders that they can help on the affordable (housing) piece, the transportation piece, the health piece — all those. Working as a team, I think we can do it. There’s a lot of things that PSD can do to get involved in that and attract new students.

“I do think, and maybe some people would think that I am naïve, but I think that we can grow the district. I think that we can increase enrollments, irrespective of the demographics. If you look at it, our housing is still relatively affordable compared to a lot of other places in Colorado. There’s a lot of people, myself included, and this is going back eight years, we looked at Boulder, and it’s like, ‘Oh that’s what you get in Boulder and the schools aren’t as good as PSD.’ That’s why we came here; it’s much more family friendly.

“I think an area that we can work on that that we haven’t explored is we can work with the Chamber of Commerce, get them involved, see if there’s a chance to have our major industries expand, Broadcom, HP, UCHealth. People will still want to live here. … Last but not least on that point, is, as a district, we need to do a better job of marketing and advertising. We do education better than anybody else in this area, whether that be charter schools, private schools, homeschool. The public schools are educating at the highest level; I am convinced of that.”

Havelda: “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I hear, essentially what you’re talking about, which I’ve heard in these conversations, too, is that we can’t continue to subsidize our small schools; that’s really the phrase that gets thrown around. And I think what I’d like to do is go back, and we really need to have a frank discussion, not only with our community but also with our school leaders and our central office, about wants vs. needs. What’s a need? What’s a want? And I think we really need to start prioritizing what those are.

“… We’ll see who’s right about the enrollment in three to four years. I think there is data that suggests that there is a COVID spike, and it may not be enough to solve the whole problem, but it’s enough for me to give pause and say, ‘Maybe we don’t close schools right now. Maybe we invest in pre-K, and we wait to see.’ And by the way, our reputation as a school district keeps going up instead of down. We’re going to still get kids in our schools. People are going to move here like they always have been.”

Reed: “Yes. I still think we need conversations on how low enrollment can get before we start going, ‘What are we going to do here?’ Even if we get this mill passed, if a school gets under 200 students, is that a crisis or not? I think the community needs to tell us is that a crisis or is that something that, yes, all of a sudden, like principals need to get involved and start talking. … Not just principals with the low enrollment; all the principals. If we’re saying this is a district problem, then we need the whole district to solve this.

“… I’m also worried about building condition. We don’t have money to fix buildings, and so whether we like it or not, the building condition is going to have to be part of that conversation, too. Just how low do we let a school get before we start to think about, we have to come up with a solution for it? … Because at some point, isn’t the inequity also the learning environment we’re asking them to be in?”

How can school closure and consolidation processes be improved moving forward?

Draper: “We need to go slow to go fast, so we need to involve the community, not just where we are but where they are. So, we need to go to a Putnam; We need to go to an Irish; We need to go to a Blevins. We need to go to those schools that have the low enrollment currently and say, ‘What are the suggestions that you have? What are we not seeing?’ Those kinds of things.

“… I feel like this is a process we should have given a year to, not six months. …  I think we needed that full year, and the reason for that would be then we could say, ‘OK, scenarios A, B, C, D. Now, let’s do the transportation studies for it. Now let’s do all of these implementation studies and figure out what is the cost going to be for transportation? What do we need to support? Who do we need to support? How are we going to do that?’

“And look at that as a whole and then do refinements from there.”

Duffy: “One of the things that is imprinted on me now is we need to engage the community on setting metrics for each individual school. We also need to be cognizant of the fact that not every school can be beholden to 400, and we need to work with the administration to set what that lower number would be, because administrators and teachers understand that running a school at 175 isn’t getting the best outcome for kids either. But we need, as a board and as a district, we need to engage them to say, ‘Hey, what is that realistic number?’ “

Reed: “If we have an area of schools where there’s under-enrollment in an area, let’s get these principals together and these communities together to say, ‘Are there some efficiencies here that we can come up with?’ Eventually, will somebody say, ‘Your program is a lot like mine. I think in a year or two, we might be able to merge, and how are we going to do that thoughtfully?’ “

Schoenbauer: “There needs to be a transparent process for this type of situation, and there’s been talk about what Boulder does, and I think we can follow a similar model to what they do and have it be, if you go into a probationary period, that type of thing. If your enrollment’s down, your scores are down, we should measure results at some point. And it has to be a fair metric based off a whole bunch of things. But if you’re struggling, then there’s a probationary period, but it’s a multiyear thing; it can’t be this instant. … So people understand, ‘Oh well this is going to have to happen.’ “

Zamora: “I think we need to take where we are right now and not lose the momentum of our community. I am very concerned that unless we are intentional about engaging with our community now, then we’re going to lose all of the brainpower that’s been put into this process. I want to develop a policy or procedure of something, something predictable for staff for community to latch onto and understand what’s going to happen, what are the trigger points, what are the things we care about. We still have a directive for (Poudre Community Academy) because their facility is an issue, so it’s not even the population or the enrollment. Sometimes, we’re going to have other triggers that cause us to need to make changes. So, identifying what are the triggers that are going to cause us to look at a school and decide. Do you need to move? Do you need to consolidate? What’s going to happen?

“I think we need to right now — because people are very invested — collect our community values as they stand today, as a launching point even if this doesn’t happen for five, 10 whatever years in the future. … It’s a good starting point just to say, ‘What do we actually care about? What’s our minimum bar that we want kids to have access to?’ And if people can get behind those values, and we can justify decisions with those values in mind, that’s a communication plan, which is what we don’t have right now.”

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, x.com/KellyLyell and  facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: PSD school board members explain decision to halt school closure plans