The Appleton Area School District Board of Education met 02/17/2022. In addition to voting to change the Covid mitigation measures and receiving a presentation regarding the possible merger of Columbus Elementary with Edison Elementary, the also received information regarding future needs planning at the middle schools.
Before jumping into that, Chief Finance Officer Greg Hartjes briefly touched on some of the facility needs at their charter schools. The question, however, was since these schools are in leased facilities not owned by the District do they want to put dollars into those spaces?
He then moved into the presentation on middle schools.
Adding 6th graders to the middle school level so that they have 3 years of middle school instead of 2 is very positive from an academic, social, and emotional standpoint. They do have some facility challenges which can be met with additions to all four of their middle schools. He said they believed those additions would come in as affordable. There were, however, two areas they wanted to look at.
One was concern about Madison’s enrollment. It currently stands at 622, and the building has a capacity of about 660. If they ad 6th grade to the middle level, in three years when current 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders are 6th, 7th, and 8th graders, Madison would have an enrollment of 939. That number originally gave them pause, but, at this point, they believe they can handle it by adding onto the building.
He pointed out that they also have lower enrollment at the kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade level in some of Madison’s feeder schools, to by 2027-2028 Madison’s enrollment was projected to drop to around 850 which was much more manageable. He noted that, in the state of Wisconsin, there are 40 middle schools with over 800 students and 13 with over 1000 students. A middle school of that size would be new for AASD, but it’s not uncommon across the state.
They did look at some other ways of dealing with these large enrollment numbers at Madison. One was to build a 5th middle school, but there just wasn’t a good location that made sense for them to do that. Additionally, a new middle school would cost $40-50 million, so it didn’t seem like a reasonable solution. They also looked at converting an elementary school to a middle school, but they didn’t have a school with enough property in the right location for them to do that.
The only feasible solution they could come up with was to move some students out of Madison Middle School.
Foster Elementary was the school that made the most sense. If they moved Foster students to Kaleidoscope for middle school, the enrollment numbers at Madison in 2024-25 dropped to 815 instead of 939. And the enrollment at Kaleidoscope would be approximately 700. The change made sense from both a facilities and cost standpoint.
The drawback was that this would require busing Foster students to Kaleidoscope. Additionally, Kaleidoscope has traditionally fed into North High School, but the Foster attendance area feeds into East High School, so Foster students would be going to Kaleidoscope but then moving back to East. For that reason, the feedback they received from the focus groups regarding this potential change was very negative. However, it was really the only solution that seemed somewhat reasonable.
The second area he wanted to draw the Board’s attention to was the idea of Houdini Elementary students moving on to Wilson Middle School as opposed to Einstein Middle School
Houdini students go on to attend West High School, and Ferber students go attend North High School Both Houdini and Ferber students come together in middle school at Einstein. They develop friendships and often want to go to the same high school as their friends which means either a Houdini student open enrolling to North or a Ferber student open enrolling to West. He said that causes some challenges for families that have to make that decision. With a potential referendum coming up, they wanted to look at whether they could fit Houdini students in at Wilson.
Currently the enrollment at Wilson which includes Magellan is at 442. If they project that out and add 6th grade, they would be looking at 774 students in the fall of 2024-25. They typically lose about 10% to open enrollment so that number would probably end up being closer to 700.
If they added Houdini students to Wilson, they would not be able to house Magellan in Wilson and would have to move Magellan to Einstein. With all of those changes, the enrollment would be projected to be 890. By 2027-28 that number would most likely be lower due to the lower enrollment numbers for current kindergarteners, 1st graders, and 2nd graders. They would also lose some to open enrollment.
He said that they didn’t know if Houdini families would all choose to open enroll to Einstein, because they haven’t talked to families yet. But, looking strictly at facility needs and cost, the leadership team wanted to get a feel from the Board as to if this was something they wanted to explore further.
He then reviewed 2024-25 projected enrollments if feeder schools remained unchanged and if Houdini and Magellan changed.
With the changes, Einstein’s enrollment would decrease, Kaleidoscope’s and Madison’s would remain the same, and Wilson’s would get larger.
At that point the meeting was out of time so there was no opportunity for discussion.
View full meeting video here: https://youtu.be/pvYHS_B7h0g
Be the first to reply