Boise considers school closures amid declining enrollment

The Boise School District says it could close a number of schools, convert others, and revamp which grades attend high school and junior high as it faces declining enrollment.

The district rolled out a number of proposals during virtual and in-person meetings this week it called “The Future of Boise Schools.” Meeting invitations didn’t hint at the scale of the proposed changes, but did note that final decisions have not been made.

The proposals include shutting down or combining some grade schools, closing several junior high schools, moving high schools from three years to four, and possibly adding a specialized new high school.

Declining enrollment Tracy Richter, a consultant, works with school districts across the country, which all face the same issue.

“We don’t have a district that we’re working with anywhere in the country that is rising in enrollment,” Richter said, which he attributed to a decline in birth rates across the country.

Factors like housing availability are also affecting school district enrollment — families may be holding onto homes longer, even after children have grown up and moved out, and young families may struggle to afford the homes that are available. When costs are prohibitive for young families to move in, it does not lead to more students for the district, Richter said.

The housing market, Richter said, creates another barrier for families looking to move. “Nobody wants to go to half the house for twice the money and four times the interest rate.”

Richter works for HPM, a consulting company contracted by the Boise School District to create a Long-Range Facilities Master Plan. The Boise School District currently has 9,000 open seats, 5,000 of which are at the elementary school level. Part of the plan aims to propose solutions to declining student enrollment, which is creating excess capacity, particularly at the district’s elementary and junior high schools.

To do so, HPM has developed and is seeking public feedback on three potential scenarios: addressing excess capacity at the high school level, junior high level, or elementary school level. The company also developed “concepts,” or ways to implement each scenario, including closing some elementary schools in the district, moving 9th grade from the junior high to high school level, and changing enrollment areas and boundaries for schools.

Richter presented each of the scenarios at a virtual and in-person meetings this week.

District patrons are being encouraged to review the potential scenarios and concepts and submit their feedback via a Fall Community Survey, available on the district’s master planning webpage. Richter said that his team received 900 responses from an initial survey in the spring, which helped them develop the scenarios under consideration now.

Richter anticipated it would take until February or March to develop a facilities master plan and make a recommendation that the district’s board of trustees would then adopt.

“What we want people to understand is that we’re not even close to any recommendations yet,” Richter said, “and we want to make sure that we are doing as transparent of a process as we can to make sure we’re getting as much input as we can from the community.”

The district could make decisions on any potential funding needed to implement the changes, such as bonds, after the master plan is established, Richter said. He estimated it could take two to five years for the district to implement any recommendation.

Under-utilization, looming deferred maintenance costs In 2025, Boise School District elementary schools were at 66.8% utilization, junior highs at 63.7%, and high schools at 81.6%, according to a slide Richter presented during Wednesday’s virtual meeting.

A music teacher in the district expressed frustration at the Tuesday evening meeting about not having enough time with students because she has to travel between schools, according to Richter.

Maintaining school facilities is expensive, but those costs become even more difficult to absorb as enrollment declines. Richter said the district anticipates $480 million in deferred maintenance costs over the next five years that it can’t afford to fix, a figure estimated at $900 million in ten years. The district can combat this by making significant financial investments, which would require a funding mechanism, reducing the number of facilities, or seeking partners to share in building repair and operations costs.

The goal is not to eliminate excess capacity, Richter said, but to reduce it.

“We need to keep flexibility in our capacity to allow for fluctuations in our enrollment,” he said.

Scenario 1: 9th graders become high schoolers One scenario the district is considering, Scenario 1, would move 9th-grade students from the junior high level to high schools.

Richter said this scenario has benefits, like giving students earlier exposure to career technical education (CTE) pathways and earlier access to advanced fine arts and athletics. High school is about objective-based learning, and students in grade nine could access higher-level courses if they studied at high schools, Richter said.

Richter described three potential concepts to carry out this scenario. Concept 1 suggests creating a four-year career development magnet school at the Frank Church High School and the Dennis Technical Education Center (DTEC) that would be open to all Boise students.

That concept would create an additional 1,000 high school seats, according to Richter, and would remain accessible to students at the district’s other high schools. It could also save the district money because it would not need to make additions to existing high schools.

He said questions remain about transportation, as well as whether the school would have fine arts and sports programs.

Concept 2 is split into 2A and 2B.

In 2A, expansion would occur at all high schools except Capital High, where the district doesn’t anticipate a need for added capacity. Boise High School could see a partnership with a neighboring organization to increase capacity, according to a slide presented by Richter. Borah High could see a combined renovation/demolition/new construction to address future capacity. For Timberline, the district could add classroom capacity by expanding existing wings.

In the concept 2B, Timberline would expand capacity by expanding into neighboring White Pine Elementary, which would no longer operate as an elementary school. Students who would go to White Pine would have to go to different elementary schools that feed into Timberline High.

For Concept 3, the district could balance enrollment by changing how students feed into elementary schools, junior high schools, and high schools. Richter said that currently, some schools experience split enrollment, or when, after elementary schooling, a student cohort is split apart among different junior high or high schools. This would also have the benefit of allowing student cohorts to remain together from elementary school through high school, he said.

Scenario 2: Addressing junior high excess capacity The district is considering a second scenario: how to address excess capacity at the junior high level. The district currently has nine junior high schools, according to its website.

The scenario could need to be considered if the district opts to move 9th graders to the high school level, a slide about the scenario said. If that happens, junior high school utilization could fall below 40%, according to Richter.

The single concept proposed is to close or combine up to three of the district’s junior high schools. Richter said the district could consider other uses for the facilities, such as other district services. Taking three junior high schools out of service would keep the utilization of the district’s remaining junior highs at 64%, he said.

The concept would also require realigning which elementary schools feed into which junior high schools, he said.

Richter said that he has received questions about the potential of moving sixth graders from elementary schools into junior high. That move is not being pursued because during the group’s initial spring survey, feedback tended toward a preference for “keeping kids, kids — keeping them at the elementary school level as long as we can,” Richter said.

Scenario 3: Addressing excess district capacity at the elementary school level The third scenario Richter presented involves addressing excess district capacity by either reducing the number of elementary schools (concept 1) or realigning elementary school boundaries to balance future high school enrollment (concept 2).

Concept 1 examines the elementary schools that feed into each high school and identifies potential candidates to close, combine, or adjust boundaries for.

The Boise High School quadrant has an excess of 1,153 elementary school seats, according to a slide presented by Richter. Potential candidates for combining or boundary adjustments are Adams, Cynthia Mann, Taft, and Roosevelt.

The Borah quadrant has an excess of about 1,150 elementary school seats. Potential candidates for closure and boundary adjustments are Monroe, Hawthorne, Jefferson, and Hillcrest.

The Capital quadrant has an excess of 1,172 elementary school seats. Potential candidates for closure and boundary adjustments are Koelsch and Horizon.

The Timberline quadrant has the least excess capacity, at about 977 seats. Potential candidates for closure or boundary adjustments are Garfield, Riverside, and White Pine.

Each slide notes that the list of potential elementary schools for combining or adjusting boundaries is not exhaustive.

For concept 2, realigning the feeding of elementary schools into junior highs and high schools, several potential pathways are outlined for each high school quadrant.

For example, in the Timberline quadrant, one pathway would “rebalance K-6 enrollment across the quadrant by realigning all elementary schools” that feed into Timberline, according to a slide presented by Richter.

In the Borah quadrant, one pathway suggests rebalancing all enrollment across all elementary schools, while another pathway suggests realigning how certain elementary schools feed into South Junior High.

Boise considers school closures amid declining enrollment

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