In the coming months, a new Facilities Planning Steering Committee will start the challenging and necessary work of evaluating the placement of educational programs, considering school and program consolidations and modifying school attendance areas. These changes will not go into effect any sooner than the 2025-26 school year.
Slowing down the process of making changes at some alternative schools, as announced in October, comes with a tradeoff: examining changes to our alternative schools, school consolidation and attendance boundary area changes will now happen simultaneously, instead of in phases over two school years.
Why is this happening now? In short, it’s about maintaining PSD’s health and vibrancy for decades to come as birth rates and student enrollment decline.
Poudre School District recently posted a Request for Proposal, or RFP, to hire an independent, external facilitator to work with the steering committee to engage our community thoughtfully and genuinely throughout the process. Staff will work with the facilitator to finalize the committee’s role and scope of work, and then communicate with our community about how they can serve on the committee.
In the meantime, we have created a new section on the PSD website called Long Range Planning at www.psdschools.org/long-range-planning. It has demographers’ reports, historic and current enrollment data, and much more, all collected in one location. We want to make it even easier to find information about the complex challenges ahead.
Communication is key as we go through this together as a community. We want to help everyone in our community understand:
- That our community’s vibrancy depends on the health of our public school district,
- The challenges ahead are real. Without action, PSD faces significant cuts to programming and services and must make changes to educational programs, possibly consolidate schools, and change boundaries,
- How PreK-12 funding works in Colorado and in PSD’s budget,
- The clear, reliable data that PSD and the committee is using to guide this work, and
- That our information is fact-based, timely and readily available.
Thank you for your continued partnership and support. We will need everyone to share their voices as we work together to do this work on behalf of all in PSD.