The Board of Education for Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools recently met to hear a presentation about closing one of its elementary schools. While the conversation is hypothetical, the discussion explored how doing so would help maximize district resources and cut down its spending.
At the meeting on August 14, CHCCS Board Chair George Griffin stressed how the preliminary conversation currently reflects neither a recommendation or plan to close an elementary school.
“My fear tonight is someone is going to get a piece of this presentation and immediately start to say there’s another agenda or we’re trying to close a school,” Griffin said. “We’re simply not. But we did want to have a sense for board members of what are the realities of dollars and dollars saved.”
CHCCS Deputy Superintendent for Operations Al Ciarochi led the presentation, focusing on how closing a school could help address evolving enrollment patterns, maximize district resources, and promote educational equity across the schools.
While there is a high returning enrollment for CHCCS middle and high schools, Ciarochi said student enrollment is declining at the elementary level, with fewer kids entering at that point. As a result, he said some classrooms are not being utilized.
“When you look at the classes that we have within our district, we do not have classes that are empty,” Ciarochi said. “Our classes are appropriately sized and we have the appropriate staff. It’s not a situation where we have more teachers than we have students. What we do have in our buildings is we have spaces that are available to be used if you were to hire additional teachers [for] if we had additional students.”
When comparing student enrollment to a school’s capacity, Ciarochi explained how CHCCS currently has a total deficiency of one school at the elementary level. Regardless of whether the district demolishes or sells a selected property, he said the closure could save it about $1.7 million annually in recurring operational costs like utilities and maintenance.
Since the pandemic, elementary school enrollment has declined by about a thousand students, according to CHCCS Superintendent Rodney Trice. (Image via CHCCS).
Selling a property could earn the district $16 million, which Ciarochi said could then be directed towards its academic priorities. But he suggested the board consider holding onto any property it might want for other uses.
“We’re not doing this or presenting this because of financial challenges that our district is incurring,” Ciarochi said. “We’ve been able to address that by right-sizing our district and allocations. But there’s a reality of the fact that if our enrollment trend is not going to grow, there are some decisions that have to be made, and I think it would be very proactive for us to move down that path in due time and when it’s right.”
Ciarochi said a closure could also help optimize resources by reallocating students to nearby schools and reducing redundancies in staffing. He said the 17 cut positions would be those not based on student enrollment, like a principal, nurse, and custodian.
He added how staff and community transparency would also be crucial in the process of phasing out a selected school.
“These positions that we would talk about, these are not high-attrition positions that just turn over all the time,” Ciarochi said. “A few might, but part of it is methodically trying to develop a plan, if at all possible if you were doing this, that you could do that methodically and make plans and possibly have interim folks in positions, knowing that if there’s a destine timeline, that people could switch and rotate.”
Key financial takeaways from the August 14 meeting. (Image via CHCCS.)
While acknowledging how the conversation is a preliminary one, he said potential next steps might include community input forums and listening sessions, instructional program evaluation, and site evaluation to see in what areas it would be feasible to close a school.
“It’s never considered a success when you close a school,” Ciarochi said. “But how do you do it to where [the process is] mitigated the most, [and] the community understands and accepts it.”
Board Member Meredith Ballew called the conversation an “uncomfortable” one to have, explaining how people are tied to their communities and schools. But she said she believes closing an elementary school is an important avenue to explore, stating how there is funding uncertainty at the federal level and the state legislature is “consistently rolling back funding.”
“We’re approaching this bond project where we have kind of a unique opportunity to rethink how we district and and really look at really sizing all of our buildings for the kids that we have,” Ballew said. “And so I think we would be really derelict to not consider all of the possibilities that are on the table. So I hope the community will hear that and know we are thinking through this deliberately and carefully.”
In an interview with 97.9 The Hill, CHCCS Superintendent Rodney Trice said while the discussion is still hypothetical, he said he thinks it is important to be ready with good information the community can lean on.
“For our board,” Trice said. “I think it’s important to have that conversation in public, which is one reason the idea was put on the table of walking us through what a closure might look like and what it might entail.”
To view the full board meeting, click here.
Featured photo via the Town of Chapel Hill.
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