Community Engagement Meeting – Dunn – Feb 20

I attended a meeting at Dunn elementary with school board members who were there to listen to local folks and their concerns. The meeting was help at the same time as one at Kruse which was a bummer since the agenda wasn’t set and it was tough to know which one I should go to.

I’m notorious for sitting in the back and taking notes in meetings where I’m not as well versed. I chimed in once but I was also under the weather and wanted to keep my distance. I loved that the majority of the group pulled up chairs in a circle to speak with each other. More info: https://www.psdschools.org/news/board-community-conversations

My notes from the event:

School board members present: Kevin Havelda, Jim Brokish, and one other member (didn’t catch the name)

One man went far down the question of Timnath taking money unfairly. (I’ll get to know more about this man later so I removed some of my original thoughts). He posted the question “do we send our kids to school to teach them that if you cheat and get away with it it’s ok?” because we are diverting 5% of the money allocated to PSD students somewhere else (Mill Levy?). He said that Timnath has had housing subsidized by $100M from our funds and our housing costs and there is illegality there. Mentioned a previous superintendent that was seen as corrupt. 20 years ago someone donated a bunch of land to provide financing and resources for urban blight (I have to look this up, I’m so lost) but now the community is benefitting and not paying hardly anything for schools even though they have two brand new schools. Another guy said it isn’t entirely true because the county has every one doing the same stuff and paying the same. The first guy said that some of the money is going toward paying off debt toward building the town and not necessarily the school. He’s mad because it’s corrupt and said our system is built on everyone pulling their own weight. My takeaway is that I need to do much more research into how/where money is sent.

There’s interest in terms of protecting marginalized students, integrating pre-school aged children, charter schools, and closing and consolidating schools. 

Consolidation

• We have one pot of money and we can’t really override what’s going on state-wide 
• We’ve had declining enrollment and birth rates
• Denver allocates money per student so we’re getting less and less money from the state calculus
• Fort Collins has a lot of schools
• 80%-85% of our costs go toward personnel (which Kevin is proud of)
• When we close schools, people are going to lose their jobs
• “4A” is an override of Mill Levy
• Allocated $4M for small schools (200 or under) to help be a band-aid 
• There is a strong desire to have a committee constantly on consolidation to stay ahead of the massive amount of information rather than have to keep restarting
• Moving forward they aren’t going to advertise what schools may be shut down because it just became chaotic

[removed a personal note]

Kids fleeing 

• Apparently we lost 1K kids last year but charter schools only gained 29 kids – where are they all going?
• One lady was talking about how she has 3 kids homeschooled and she wants them to be in the district but there was an issue with special ed
• “Sold a Story” is a podcast about the science of reading
• There was a lot of talk about how we changed the curriculum with literacy – which I agree with. They did away with the old school phonics change and it didn’t work really well
• They are working on “Choose PSD” which isn’t just a marketing ploy but trying to figure out to bring people back
• Kevin felt like we had too many fiefdoms and high individualizations

State issues

• Less students = less dollars and 4A is a band-aid
• There are items going on in the state level that will affect us
• One is “averaging” where you’re looking at the average for students across 4 years (which sort of helps us when numbers are down in the short term) — this essentially means that at some point you’re funding an empty seat
• “floor funded” which says that we are in the goldilocks zone of having the lowest funding because of our size – we’re big but not too big, but not too small, etc. They are looking at ways to change the thresholds there a bit.
• Recognizing that the last few years we have all enjoyed tax breaks related to schools
• They are essentially 2 things at play for funding —- specific bills like security/cop stuff last year and ways to get us back up to where we would be if we hadn’t had cuts

Federal issues

• Kevin is saying that the exec orders are coming out so fast that it’s absolute chaos and no one knows what’s what
• He’s a lawyer so he’s looking at legality and where dollars are being funneled
• He feels like the stuff that’s happening now will take months or years to start infiltrating our schools 
• Love what he said about ICE how if they show up with a federal judicial warrant they HAVE to let them in but if they don’t then they will treat it like anyone else showing up to the school with a gun and go into lockdown
• ***Go to look at our sherriff’s statements that they’ve issued about ICE
• Legally, we could lose lots of money (we get $30M in federal grants per year right now)
• National politics and changes are so stressful (we are doing things like ratifying Black History Month) even when nationally the US wants to end it
• [personal comment about the president removed]
• We only have one lawyer for the district (we should have 5) so if lawsuits come it’s going to cause challenges – the big question is what can we do before the lawsuits to protect kids and maintain our values?

Question:

• Why do we have a PSD school in Loveland (Bamford) and how can we make better use of the facility?