Jeffco School Board votes to close 16 schools
There are 16 schools in Jeffco Public Schools that will close after a vote by the school board. The board voted on Thursday night to close the schools on July 1, 2023.
The schools that will close are Emory, Peck, Thomson, Campbell, Peiffer, Colorow, Green Mountain, Bergen Meadow K-2, Molholm, Glennon Heights, Parr, Sheridan Green, Witt, Vivian, Wilmore Davis, and Kullerstrand Elementary. Bergen will close a year later than the rest of the schools.
For hundreds of students and dozens of teachers in Jefferson County, this will be the last year in schools they have grown to love.
"I am so sad, Wilmore Davis is everything in my house," Val Nosler beck told school board members at Thursday night's meeting.
Her emotional plea would be the last the board would hear before making a decision that would seal the fate of 16 schools communities.
"Our job is to look out for all of our students collectively and take into account whether or not all of our schools have the resources they need," board member Paula Reed said.
She and other board members tried to explain the difficult position they were in ahead of that vote. With declining enrollment and budget concerns, a change they said, had to be made.
"We knew it was coming, that they were only gratuitously listening to us but it's still devastating to know its final," Jennifer Tibitt a mother of Kullerstrand Elementary students said after the vote.
There are more than 400 faculty and staff that would be displaced by the closures. While many will be given priority for new positions, not all are guaranteed a spot. The district said these will likely not be the last round of closures either. Next year it plans to look at secondary schools.
Others continued to question why no other options were presented.
"They've done nothing except throw our children under the bus," another mother said.
Families before the vote warned board members that approving the closures would only breed distrust in the district.
"The way this has all been directed it gives me major suspicions and has shattered my trust with Jefferson County," Jeffco parent Nathaniel Hunsaker said.
Jeffco Public Schools superintendent Tracy Dorland who made the recommendation to the board says it wasn't a decision that anyone wanted to make and understands the frustration of parents.
"We are committed to supporting our families through the transition in ways that allow us to be very present with them and answer their questions and build, hopeful through that, build back trust," she said.
For the families and staff at those soon-to-be-closed schools, the focus now turns to what the future looks like.
"I'm going to look at options... I would like to take my kids out of the district," Tibitt said.
The district, which remains the state's second-largest, has the capacity to serve 96,000 students in traditional district-managed schools. There are currently 69,000. There are 49 schools with fewer than 250 children and/or a building capacity utilization of under 60%. The district has 10,600 open seats. Some of that is attributable to the growth of charter schools. But the population of school-aged children in Jefferson County has declined by over 29,000 between 2000 and 2020.
