The Appleton Area School District Board of Education is going to be voting soon on shutting down Columbus Elementary School as a neighborhood school and repurposing the building for other purposes within the district. As a result, I thought it might be beneficial to revisit the 12/09/2024 Board meeting during which members of the public provided public feedback on the proposal and the Board received a presentation from the Leadership Team explaining their reasons for wanting to make these changes.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
The Leadership Team’s reasons for wanting to close Columbus as a neighborhood school are fairly straightforward. The building is small with a maximum capacity of only 135 students and enrollment decreased after Covid to unsustainably low levels. It had been hovering around 100 students and then dropped down to 79 in the 2024-25 school year as a result of the district moving a number of students with special needs to Edison in order to better serve their needs.
The low enrollment numbers mean that classes are very small which impacts staffing. Generally, the district prefers to have more than one classroom per grade level in each school. This provides peer support, collaboration, and mentorship opportunities for the teachers that are not as easily provided at a school when there is only one classroom per grade level. This resulted in a high turnover rate of classroom teaching staff, with Columbus losing 14-21 staff members per year through transfers, resignations, and retirements. Columbus also had a disproportionate number of new teachers with the teachers at Columbus having an average experience of 2/12 years.
Additionally, because of its low enrollment numbers, the schools specialty staff for things like art, music, physical education, and STEM as well as counselors, psychologists, and social workers were available on a more limited, travelling, part-time basis than they were at other schools. Columbus had 19 traveling staff members, and beyond impacting the quality of services available at Columbus, the fact that those staff members were away from other schools also impacted those other schools.
Superintended Greg Hartjes estimated that by closing Columbus as a neighborhood school and moving the students to a different school, the district would experience between $500,000 and $700,000 worth of savings due to staffing efficiencies.
The closure of Columbus would also be in line with recent actions in other school districts. Superintendent Hartjes told the Board, “Green Bay, Neenah, and Oshkosh have recently closed or repurposed schools with between 150 and 250 students. Last week when Wausau came out and said, they’re closing four schools, one of them had 222 students. Another one was 195. Another one was 185. And so, when looking at the 20 largest districts in the state—not Milwaukee, the next 20 largest—Columbus is the only neighborhood elementary school with less than 150 students. They are very much an outlier in our state. There are some rural schools and some charter schools, obviously that are smaller, but to have a neighborhood elementary school of less than 150 students is really unheard of.”
The Leadership Team had no final recommendation on which school or schools the Columbus students would be moved to. The closest elementary schools were Edison, Franklin, and Dunlap, so Columbus’ attendance area would be placed into the attendance areas of one or more of those schools in some way.
11 members of the public spoke on the item. They were a mixture of Columbus and Edison parents.
Broadly speaking, they viewed Columbus as a vital community asset that was important to maintaining the social cohesion of the neighborhood. They referenced the recent upgrade to the Columbus playground and it’s benefit as a neighborhood park. They highlighted the safety and ease of students walking to Columbus which would be negatively impacted if they had to go to Edison or Dunlap.
Additionally, concerns were raised over how this change would impact Edison. Edison had already taken in around 20 students from Columbus who needed special services, and commenters felt that Edison had not been provided the resources it needed to properly serve these new students while also serving the established Edison students. They thought it would be irresponsible to send even more students to Edison without providing appropriate resources to the school to manage the influx and change.
The members of the public also voiced concern over how quickly this decision was being made, particularly in light of the much slower process around establishing the boundaries for the new Sandy Slope Elementary school.
They offered a number of suggestions for alternatives uses for Columbus including using it as a neighborhood 4K and Kindergarten school, having it serve as the location of a charter school, or integrating it with Edison as a dual-campus school. They wanted the building used in a way that would benefit the neighborhood rather than repurposing it in a way that wouldn’t serve the local community directly.
The Leadership Team did not believe the site would serve well as either a dedicated preschool location or a charter school. 3k/4k classrooms all require in classroom bathrooms, but the Columbus building is 130 years old and the remodeling that would be required to install bathrooms in all the classrooms would not be feasible. Additionally, regardless of what the use of the building is, the capacity of the building is capped at 135 students which makes it undesirable as a charter school location. Superintendent Hartjes told the Board, “There’s not a charter school that wants to move into the Columbus building. Part of the reason is the capacity, again. Many of our charter schools want to be larger, and so to bring up to them that—we did look at, that. We talked about would it make sense for ABS to move across the street? Well, ABS has 139 students this year, and wants to grow. They’d like to get back to 177 students where they were prior to the pandemic. So that number, that limiting number of 135, really is a struggle.”
He said they had not considered a dual-campus model and could look at that more. That model was not something that had been done in AASD.
One of the members of the public had stated there were over 300 preschool children living in the Columbus neighborhood right now. Near the end of the meeting Board Member Kris Sauter harkened back to that and asked about how many kindergarteners AASD expected to get in the future.
Superintendent Hartjes responded by giving a district-wide overview, saying “So, you know, the information we have is what has been our trend in our schools, individual schools, individual grades across our district. We do know that for many years we’d have on either side of 1,100 kindergarteners come in, and so that would go all the way through. We pick up a few more at high school. So, we might be between 1,100 and 1,200. Our last two kindergarten groups were less than 1,000. So, we know that. Whether 300 kids are going to enroll in the AASD in a few years, we don’t, we don’t have any idea about that. With vouchers and home school and private school options and open enrollment school of choice options, it’s very, very hard for us to predict anything other than predictions based on what we have in our schools and what that tells us. So, I don’t know anything about that 300 number.”
The Leadership Team wanted the Board to make a decision relatively quickly as to whether or not Columbus would be open as an elementary school because in February and March they would be arranging staffing for the 2025-26 school year.
The Board of Education has two meetings in January, one on the 13th and one of the 27th. The Leadership Team hoped to bring this to them on the 13th and then if it took one more meeting for them to decide, that could be done on the 27th.
View full meeting details here: https://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=DB8PUC664BC8
View full meeting video here: https://www.youtube.com/live/W6yznA99lMU?si=ua1A5DGKG905xFms
Be the first to reply