Five elementary schools are on the chopping block in the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District: Hunter, Midnight Sun, Pearl Creek, Salcha and Two Rivers.
District administrators announced the list when they delivered their proposed consolidation plan Monday night at a Board of Education work session.
The district is dealing with a series of fiscal realities including budgetary shortfalls, declining enrollment and underused space in elementary schools.
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Last spring, that led the district to begin the process for selecting schools to propose for closure. Chief Operating Officer Andreau DeGraw said arriving at those selections involved weighing variables like the condition of facilities, impact to transportation routes, current staff vacancies and school geography.
Monday marked the start of the latest phase in that process, with administrators releasing the plan that recommends shuttering one elementary school in each of five regions in the borough: the southeast, northeast, west, North Pole and central Fairbanks regions.
“As we looked at geography, we wanted to ensure that we didn’t close too many schools in one area of our district to where … there would be too many students in closed schools for adjacent schools to take,” DeGraw said.
If the board opts to close all five elementary schools, administrators expect to save about $7 million annually for the first couple years, and about $5 million each year after that.
In combination with the $3 million the district expects to retain by contracting custodial work, the closures would take a $10 million bite out of the projected budget deficit of between $8 million and $32 million.
Administrators can’t say exactly what the deficit will be because the district budget largely depends on what funding the school system receives from the state and the Fairbanks North Star Borough, which can fluctuate as the governments hammer out their own budgets.
Beyond savings, the consolidation plan also targets increasing the number of students relative to each school’s capacity. And Superintendent Luke Meinert says the district should consider offloading schools even if the budget picture brightens with additional funding from the state or borough.
“I think we should still be at the table talking about school consolidations because of the loss in enrollment and the potential reinvestment back in our schools to lower class sizes, add back music, and do some of these things that we’ve wanted to do,” he said.
According to district data, enrollment has dropped by more than 2,100 students in the last 20 years, but the number of school buildings has increased over that same period.
DeGraw told the board Monday that schools ideally reach 85% or more of enrollment capacity, but that, on average, district elementary schools are currently at about 67%.
Under the consolidation plan, the redistribution of students is projected to increase that rate to between 77% and 95% at the remaining elementary schools.
And using an archery metaphor, DeGraw says that just about exhausts the options for consolidation.
“The arrows in the quiver are pretty much gone. If the board accepts the recommendation and the administration closes five schools, we can all see, the capacity levels that we see – there’s not five more schools that we can close. They’re not there,” he told the board.
The board didn’t cast final votes on the consolidation plan Monday, and they won’t until Feb. 4. Between now and then, the board has two more work sessions scheduled for Jan. 13 and Jan. 27, as well as public listening sessions scheduled for Jan. 16 and Jan. 22.