Board decides schools will close

Sunset and North City elementary schools will close this fall, while Room Nine Community School and Home Education Exchange will move to other buildings.

The Shoreline School Board approved the changes at a Monday, April 16, meeting in front of a large crowd of parents, staff, students and others. Altogether, the changes they approved will save about $1.8 million, according to district estimates. About $1.4 million of that is estimated to come from the school closures.

The cuts are meant to help balance the district’s ailing budget. In tandem with reducing the middle school day, approved earlier this spring, the savings is estimated at $2.4 million.

The district estimates it will end the year $1.8 million in the red. It will have extra costs on top of that from teacher raises that are not funded by the state, said Marcia Harris, the district’s deputy superintendent. Moving costs for the schools are estimated at $100,000 to $150,000, she said.

The vote to close North City was unanimous.

The vote to close Sunset saw disagreement. Board members Debi Ehrlichman and David Wilson expressed concern over closing the school considering that some students might have to bus across busy Aurora Avenue.

Superintendent Sue Walker said that it was possible to keep students who live on the west side of Aurora in schools on the west side of Aurora. But to do that, all special programs at Highland Terrace and Syre elementaries would have to move their special programs. The schools also would have to stop out-of-boundary exceptions. (See related story.)

Board members asked how it would impact the district’s budget to keep Sunset open. Closing the school has been estimated to save about $700,000.

Walker said that if only one school was closed, the district would have to look at staffing cuts. Harris said that new cuts would have to be determined quickly, since merely getting to zero on the ending fund balance wasn’t acceptable. She said it was necessary to achieve $2.5 to $3 million in savings.

“I’ve been looking for (other) savings,” she said. “I don’t have a $700,000 rabbit in my hand.”

In the end, Ehrlichman voted against closing Sunset.

“I need more time to make a decision,” she said. “There are so many unknowns.”

Wilson abstained from voting, while the other board members voted to close the school.

The issue of moving the Room Nine Community School and Home Education Exchange also raised discussion. Board member Dan Mann expressed concern that moving the programs would hurt their student numbers and thus not achieve estimated savings.

Other board members disagreed, saying that the savings was substantial and that other students in the district also were hurt by cuts.

The board voted to move Room Nine to an existing school, thus cutting off the possibility of it being moved to the North City building. The suggestion to move it to North City had been made by a boundary committee in recent weeks.

“We heard (from parents) how unfair that is, and how unethical,” Ehrlichman said.

Board members said the decision was hard for them.

“This is extremely difficult, extremely gut wrenching,” said board president Mike Jacobs.

Wilson got choked up at points and held his head in two hands at others.

No public comment was taken, but afterwards parents and staff huddled in groups talking.

Alice Lawson has two children potentially affected by the change. One son attends North City in the highly capable program and the other is a fifth-grader at Brookside Elementary. Because of where they live, she thinks their school boundary might be changed.

“As a family, we’ve been having the conversation and slanting it to the positive: meeting new kids, new possibilities,” she said. “Transition’s hard on kids, but transitions have to happen. The next step is how do we manage it well.”

Lisa Surowiec, who has two children at Sunset, said she was disappointed and frustrated.

“It felt like a train wreck,” she said. “There was nothing strong enough or important enough you could throw in front of it.”

For months, parents have been doing research to try to show why closing schools wouldn’t make sense. Hundreds showed up to public hearings, and students participated in rallies.

The next step, said Cheryl Middleton, a former North City parent who has been working against the school closures, is to focus on boundary changes. North City students look to be split up to three or four different schools, she said.

She and parent Anne Udaloy have heard some say they don’t want North City students at their school because the WASL scores would go down, they said.

In addition, Middleton, Udaloy and other North City parents are pushing forward with a current recall petition of Jacobs, Mann and board member Jim Leigh.

Even if it did turn out to be impossible to gather signatures now, given time line constraints, the group can resubmit it if the three are re-elected in November, Middleton said.

She said she appreciated some of what had been said that night.

“I appreciate Debbie and Dave’s comments,” she said, referring to Ehrlichman and Wilson. “I’d have appreciated that earlier: that it’s hard, that it hurts, that there are kids in those schools.”