School board to host public hearing on Beitel closure
The 70-year-old elementary school is projected to cost the district $4.2 million in major maintenance over the next half decade. But teachers and parents call it “an integral part of our community.”
In the face of declining district enrollment figures, falling state appropriations and mounting maintenance costs, Albany County School District No. 1 could soon close Beitel Elementary School, redistributing its current students to other schools in the district.
But the Albany County School Board has yet to take a final vote on the matter, and before it does, will host a public hearing Wednesday, aiming to gather community input from parents, teachers, students or others in the community.
“When the board considers a decision such as the closure of an elementary school, it is critical that we hear the many and varied viewpoints of our community,” Board Chair Beth Bear said. “While we always seek feedback and input from our community, a decision of this magnitude requires a special public hearing so that everyone who wishes to speak in support of or opposed to the closure/consolidation has an opportunity to do so.”
School administrators have said the closure is necessary given that enrollment projections show the district losing one elementary school’s worth of students in the next five years. But Beitel teachers and parents have pushed back in defense of their old but tight-knit school community.
The public hearing begins at 6 p.m. in the Laramie Middle School cafeteria. Speakers do not have to sign up, but they will be limited to three minutes on the microphone.
“We will go for as long as is needed to hear our community,” Bear said. “We do have a regular board meeting that evening so we may pause public comment at 8 p.m. to attend to board business before resuming the public hearing portion.”
Among other topics, the school board will use that regular board meeting at 8 p.m. to consider the approval of the Antelope Creek schoolhouse in Garrett, a project explicitly funded in the new state budget.
The school board will vote on the Beitel proposal during its regular meeting May 8.
The case for closure
Superintendent John Goldhardt presented a plan for the “consolidation” of Beitel Elementary during the school board’s work session last week.
He said the consolidation proposal is driven by both budgeting concerns and steady declines in district enrollment figures.
Beitel Elementary has the capacity for 304 students, but only 215 students are enrolled this year — meaning that the school is realizing just 70 percent of its capacity. This is all the more strange in light of the neighborhood’s demographics.
According to Goldhardt’s presentation, there are roughly 400 elementary-aged children within Beitel’s service boundary. But just 45 percent of those children attend Beitel, while 55 percent attend different schools. That means a majority of the families with school-age children living within the traditional boundary for Beitel Elementary choose to send their children elsewhere — mostly to other district schools, charter schools or the UW Lab School.
There are a few children living outside the Beitel boundary who nonetheless attend the school, but nowhere near enough to make up for the children it loses.
Other elementary schools are facing even steeper enrollment declines. Indian Paintbrush has lost more than 80 students in the years since 2020 and is now realizing just 64 percent of its maximum capacity. Spring Creek has lost about the same number of students, but is now sitting at about 48 percent of its maximum capacity.
Beitel enrollment actually hasn’t changed much in the years since the pandemic, dropping just 9 students since 2021, but Goldhardt said the long-term decline districtwide is clear.
“What matters is the trend: are we going up? Are we going down? Are we going up and down?” he said. “And consistently, we’re showing a projection of a downward slope in our community of school age children. I have to admit, I don’t like the data. This is not something you want. But it is correct and we have to look at it and decide what we will do and how we plan for that.”
The proposal, as presented by Goldhardt, is to consolidate these elementary schools — a move that could save significant cash by pulling together the resources currently stretched across three schools.
The plan is to close Beitel and send its current students elsewhere. But given that Beitel’s enrollment has barely fallen, why not close Indian Paintbrush or Spring Creek and move those students to Beitel?
Simply put: Beitel is the most expensive elementary school to maintain in the district. Built more than 70 years ago, Beitel Elementary is also the oldest. If it remains open, the district anticipates spending more than $4.2 million on major maintenance across the next five years.
That’s more than the anticipated major maintenance for Indian Paintbrush ($1.1 million) and Spring Creek ($880,000) combined. (Beitel is also older than both other schools combined, given that both Indian Paintbrush and Spring Creek were built just 32 years ago.)
Add to these enrollment trends and maintenance projections the fact that the district is facing a severe budget crisis, brought on by declining contributions from the state, recent inflation, and what several trustees now see as a years-long mismanagement of the district’s finances.
Last year, the board cut about $1 million from the district budget and will have to cut about $1 million more to “rightsize” the district. That will include cutting beloved programs and it will require layoffs. But Goldhardt said the board will need to take even more decisive action, possibly even this elementary consolidation, to get out of the red.
“Is this easy? No. It’s not easy at all,” he told the board. “Will we please everybody? No. That is impossible. But we cannot get our budgets in order on staff cuts alone.”
Touted benefits
Goldhardt’s presentation predicts that closing Beitel will save the district more than $500,000 in annual expenses. That figure already factors in the state funding reduction of $163,000 that will come with having one fewer school.
But the district will save the money it would otherwise be spending on a principal, janitors, a nurse, counselor and two teachers. While these positions will be eliminated, Goldhardt said many of these personnel could likely be slotted into vacancies elsewhere in the district. According to the same presentation, the district stands to save about $69,000 on utilities.
“We save over $500,000, and that’s $500,000 of teachers we may not have to let go,” Goldhardt said. “And we have a more efficient utilization of our facilities.”
The superintendent added that, despite initial fears, he does not foresee class sizes going up. Students might even get more attention if the specialists in the district are not spending time traveling between three schools.
“We’d have better and more programming for our students; we’d have more supports and interventions for students,” Goldhardt said. “We’d have a synergy of talent coming together on behalf of students.”
In defense of Beitel
The closure of Beitel — or the “consolidation” of Beitel and Spring Creek — has been a tough pill to swallow for the students, parents and teachers who make up the Beitel community.
The board first floated the idea of closing Beitel during a meeting in September. The closure was one item on a list of potential cuts and cost-saving measures.
Several members of the Beitel community came out in defense of their school, describing their “anger, frustration and hurt.”
Meghan Siebigteroth, a teacher, said she had never been involved in a school community “as strong as Beitel.”
“I just urge you to consider what it could do to the entire community of Laramie by breaking up such an incredibly strong school community,” Siebigteroth said in September. “The last thing that I would like to say is that my students are bound and ready to go to save our school. They’re coming up with fundraising ideas. They’re talking to their parents. They’ve written letters … I have students who haven’t written anything for me this year that put down a lot of words on these papers.”
Crystal Graf, another Beitel teacher, said the school isn’t just a community, it’s a family.
“You don’t shut a family down,” she said. “I understand we’ve been there for 72 years. That means that there’s 72 years worth of students, parents, grandparents that have gone to that school. We have staff that went to that school and are now working at Beitel. It is an integral part of our community that we cannot let go.”
Many commenters, including Graf but also Beitel parent Jordan Anderson, were skeptical of the purported cost-savings. Given the district’s plan to layoff teachers or eliminate vacant teaching positions, Anderson said she feared that class sizes would indeed go up.
“Closing Beitel will uproot our children from their routine, their comfort, their teachers, their friends,” Anderson said. “Closing schools is going to force our parents and our teachers to make decisions that will further impact our district. We could be looking at homeschool, we could be looking at our Montessori school if they’re not already full, or leaving Laramie completely. The risks do not outweigh the costs.”
The force of this response from the Beitel community encouraged the board to schedule a public hearing on the issue and host that hearing in a venue much larger than the central office board room where the trustees usually meet.
During the work session last week, Trustee Carrie Murthy encouraged the Beitel community and others to attend the public hearing and share their thoughts and concerns.
“We really want to hear from Beitel families, from Spring Creek families, from others in our community what this will mean for you,” Murthy said. “And that can come in an email as well. If you’re not able to make it to the public hearing next week, we want to hear from you. The more we hear from the community, the better we can wrap our heads around this issue.”
The board docs already show movement. It looks like the current principal at Spring Creek is being moved into another role which makes the transition easy to see.
The district will save nothing when they move the Lab School or the administration offices into Beitel. All they are doing is uprooting 2 communities. Maybe some of the administrative bloat needs to go before cutting schools.