There Should Be A Very High Bar For School Closures - It Has Not Been Met

My name is Katie Slife Rustad and I’m a mother of four children, three currently enrolled in the Lakewood Schools and a lifelong Lakewood Resident. I’m also a product of the Lakewood Schools, as are my husband, my parents, my in-laws, our brothers and many of our aunts, uncles and cousins. My husband’s grandfather graduated from Lakewood High in 1945, making our children 4th generation Rangers. To put it simply, we are entrenched in and massive advocates of the Lakewood Public Schools: our house bleeds purple and gold.

You may have seen information on the Elementary Planning Task Force that was convened earlier this year and the community meetings that were set up to communicate their findings. You may also be aware of the rumors circulating for the past couple years that the administration wants to close a school. I like to think of myself as a logical and pragmatic person - I assumed that if a school needs to be closed that’s unfortunate, but that there must be sound reasoning behind it. I attended one of the community meetings with an open mind, hoping to gain an understanding.

In the 30-minute presentation we learned that enrollment is down, and operating costs have increased. The district has responded by eliminating positions through attrition, which creates the need to shuffle teachers between elementary buildings based on need. There is also inconsistency in class sizes across buildings, and some other logistical issues with operating decentralized preschools. This was all positioned as the reason to form a task force to evaluate building usage.

The task force was charged with analyzing scenarios for the buildings in the future. There was then a financial overview that told us that: 

*There is no impending or forecasted budget deficit,

*State funding for the district is NOT impacted by the decline in enrollment, and

*Regardless of any changes made, Lakewood will need to pass another levy in 2026.

This set the stage to cover the scenarios the task force reviewed, all but one of which involve closing an elementary school, several involve closing two...and this is where they lost me.

Based on the presented challenges, we’re going to jump into closing buildings? There was also an expressed desire to open a centralized pre-k building in one of the closed schools which would allow increased enrollment in pre-k. There was no data showing unmet demand to justify a centralized pre-k. It felt like a very big leap of logic to me--as if the facts were chosen to back up the conclusions--and I left afterwards feeling very confused. A friend of mine on the task force encouraged me to attend another meeting – there is so much information he said, and it may take a few times hearing it to digest.

Hearing the presentation a second time only cemented my skepticism in the logic and after reviewing the information again several times online I question the school board’s decision to go through this process, especially to alter the fabric of our school district so dramatically and permanently in such a short period of time. To list what in my mind are the main, but not only, issues:

  • Safety was not mentioned anywhere in the entire presentation, meanwhile we currently have a crossing guard shortage. There was no analysis of how closing a school would change walking routes, therefore impacting student safety.
  • The budget savings being estimated for closing a building are nominal when compared with the size of the overall budget. $500K annually amounts to a 0.6% annual budget savings.
  • Lakewood has to put up a school levy in 2026 but we are not being told the millage increase we would need to maintain all of the current elementary schools. Costs have gone up, it would be logical to appeal to voters to increase funding in kind. The 2020 levy passed with 76% of the vote – Lakewood residents overwhelmingly support the schools.
  • All of the high-quality full-time daycare centers in the area already provide preschool as well as year-round full-time care. There was no data provided to show demand exists for a central preschool building that only provides curriculum during the school year. To clarify, this is NOT a proposed daycare facility.
  • Enrollment decline was discussed at length, but there was a confusing mix of “projected” and “actual” that didn't appear to add up. As one parent put it “the Math isn’t Mathing.” There is also debate about whether the actual decline is plateauing.
  • There was a heavy reliance on “birth rate” to inform the enrollment projections, with no reference to the rate of households with school aged children. My perception is that many families with children move here with school aged kids, specifically for the neighborhood schools, making the birth rate in Lakewood a less reliable basis for enrollment projections.

I learned after the meetings that all of the scenarios were provided by a consulting firm that was hired before the task force was even convened. If we truly want a community informed decision, why is a consulting firm providing a small number of choices to the task force, almost all of which involve closing a building or multiple buildings? I also learned there was an effort by the board to close Grant elementary school in 2009 that became very contentious, was opposed by the community--including community members on the task force itself-- and ultimately failed. We just spent millions of dollars to rebuild Grant because the community demanded it… and now we’re talking about closing Grant, or Lincoln, or Roosevelt, or TWO of those brand-new schools?

The community has already spoken: Lakewood citizens value our unique culture of neighborhood schools.

If you recently received the survey card in the mail, you may find it vague and notice it does not ask the essential question: are you opposed to closing an elementary school?

I am not a person that believes we should keep all schools open no matter the cost, I can concede that under dire circumstances it could in fact be necessary… but the case that has been presented thus far is just plain weak. That is the feedback everyone should be providing in the comments section of the survey: there should be a very high bar for school closures, and it simply has not been met.

Katie Slife Rustad is a lifelong Lakewood resident, graduate of the Lakewood City Schools, and mother of four Rangers.

Katie Slife Rustad

Lifelong Lakewood resident, graduate of the Lakewood City Schools, mother of 4 Rangers.

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Volume 21, Issue 2, Posted 11:08 AM, 01.23.2025