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Polk Elementary School fifth grader Trent Cox (right) walks with his mother, Dawn Kearney (from left), father Clinton Buress and older brother CJ Buress as he leaves on the second-to-last day of school on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, in Cedar Rapids. Polk will close at the end of this school year. Trent will attend Wilson Middle School next year. (Liz Martin/The Gazette)
Emails among Cedar Rapids school district officials document the uncertainty, tension and political pressure leading to the decision to close two elementary schools.
Four elementary schools were potentially on the chopping block — Harrison, Madison, Monroe and Polk. In the weeks leading up the board’s vote, the community was swarmed by “Save our school” pleas from Harrison, Madison and Polk families.
Monroe, an early-childhood school serving kindergarten students, did not have an organized effort.
School board members voted March 12 to close Monroe and Polk at the end of the school year, but emails obtained by The Gazette via an open-records request show that several school board members questioned Harrison’s long-term viability.
Taking sides?
When Superintendent Dave Benson presented his school closure and boundary recommendations in February, he said leaving Harrison open supported the city’s flood-recovery efforts.
This decision came almost three months after Mayor Ron Corbett sent a letter to the enrollment stakeholder committee, asking them not to close the northwest school.
In a Dec. 1 email to board President John Laverty, Corbett said he met with Benson about Harrison a year ago.
“He assured me Harrison would not be on the list,” Corbett wrote. “He even pointed out investments the school district was making or was going to make in Harrison.”
Benson remembers it differently.
“My final summative comment to the meeting, as I recall, was that I would go where the data takes us, and that’s what happened,” he said.
Still, when Benson recommended that Harrison remain open, he stressed that the district would reassess its position if the school’s neighborhood/residential enrollment does not grow to at least 70 percent of building capacity by the 2016-17 academic year.
The city’s failure to secure enough votes for the extended local-option sales tax a few weeks later — the second loss in less than a year — had school board members wondering if Harrison’s five-year reprieve was granted too soon.
Laverty wrote an email to Benson on Feb. 24, stating he’d “heard from a couple of board members with renewed discussion that IF the March 6 CREST (Cedar Rapids extended sales tax) flood-protection vote fails, they may ask that we consider closing Harrison sooner than the 5-year waiting period you have proposed.”
“This is a problem, and the District could be played by either side,” Benson replied.
Harrison wasn’t discussed before the board’s vote, but its future was mentioned at the March 12 school board meeting.
Board member Ann Rosenthal was the first board member to suggest that the district reconsider the future. Several board members agreed that the school needs to be reassessed in the next year, not the next five years as originally discussed.
Benson said that was the last time he’s discussed Harrison with the school board. He said there are no plans at this time to reassess the school’s future, although that could change, despite the five-year reprieve.
“History is going to influence how fast and in what manner Harrison might be revisited,” Benson said. “We just don’t know what that history is going to be because it’s in the future.”
What’s next?
The answer could come from the district’s facilities master plan. Benson said the plan, which should be presented to board members in spring 2013, will help the district prioritize future expenses and expansion, and give insight as to what the future of education might look like.
“We have key elements of a facilities master plan already in place, but they need to be brought together in a cohesive plan so that we can lay this out for the board and there can be a coordinated effort between all of these elements,” Benson said.
Board members had their first look at this process at the May 14 meeting. It will include input from three committees — instructional visioning, steering and building-based leadership.
“This process should, at the end of the day, help future boards make decisions around where to invest our limited resources,” Benson said.
Board members will receive periodic updates about the planning process, but several asked if the public will be informed, too. Their concerns stemmed from the rumors that plagued the district during the enrollment study stakeholder committee meetings.
The meetings weren’t open to the public, a practice that frustrated parents and the general public.
“We would have been, I think, disappointed if the public and parents weren’t passionate about this subject,” Laverty said. “The level of frustration, I guess, by some in the public was a bit of surprise. So I think doing some forward thinking in terms of how to involve the public in any way at a sooner level would certainly be something we would look at for the future.”
Is it enough?
The district began looking at the issue of declining enrollment and demographic shifts in 2008. The process was suspended following the June 2008 flood but relaunched during the 2010-11 school year.
“The issue was always around facility utilization,” Benson said. “Are we utilizing our facilities and our resources in the best manner?”
The district’s middle and high school boundary lines were changed to ease overcrowding at Kennedy High School.
Closing Polk and Monroe, and moving those students to other schools, will bring the district’s elementary capacity from percentages in the low 60s to about 73 percent.
Polk families were given a choice of 15 other buildings within the district to attend for the 2012-13 academic year. Of those 182 students, the majority will go to Arthur, followed by Johnson, Taylor, Garfield and Grant Wood schools.
Twenty-nine Polk students will attend Taylor next year, adding numbers to a school that has struggled with student enrollment since the flood. Taylor has a capacity of 475 students. Its 2011-12 enrollment was 237 students.
Harrison has a capacity for 550 students. The school’s 2011-12 enrollment was 271 students. In contrast, Polk had 214 students enrolled this year. The building can hold 350 students.
“The long and the short is, yes, it was enough for now,” Benson said. “Whether it is enough in the long term can’t be answered at this time.”
Closing Polk will net approximately $700,000 in savings for the school district. Closing Monroe will save the district $550,000. Shifting Wilson elementary students to Grant elementary will save the district $175,000.
These figures account for the staff members that worked in the schools, not the building itself.
Monroe will remain empty next year, but Polk will become the Polk Alternative Education Center. The building will house some of the district’s secondary-education programs currently held off-site, as well as several community organizations.
“Looking at boundaries and issues of declining enrollment are difficult under the best of circumstances, and you never have the best of circumstances,” Benson said. “There are always going to be questions about process and motives, and you just have to anticipate that as a superintendent and prepare for that as best you can.”
The aftermath
District personnel are ready to move beyond last year’s frustrations. The months of discussion, petitions and pleas at school board meetings took their toll on all involved.
On March 5, Polk’s principal, Lisa TeBockhorst, wrote an email to Mary Ellen Maske, the district’s executive administrator of pre-K through eighth grade, saying three staff members were ready for Polk to close. If the school remained open, she wrote, these teachers wanted to relocate.
“The momentum is slowly deteriorating,” TeBockhorst wrote. “I would argue that the culture is perhaps what has made Polk what it is. All the unfortunate events, along with the media attention and uproar, has deflated the staff. If Polk remains open, I think it will be difficult to get some of that great culture back.”
When asked about that message, TeBockhorst said the email was just one piece of many conversations that took place during the enrollment and boundary study process.
“Emotions were very high at that time, one week before the (school board) decision,” she said. “Not surprisingly, there were varying opinions among staff members regarding possible closure. Research shows that when decisions such as school closures are debated, it takes a toll on a school community. Hence, my choice of words in the email.”
TeBockhorst said the staff’s frustration never touched the students. Polk parent Dawn Kearney disagrees.
“It got pretty bad,” she said. “The teachers have given up. Honestly, I think it’s good that it’s done and over with.”
Kearney’s son is in fifth grade. This would have been his last year at Polk, even if the school had remained open, but Kearney said the difference between the first two years at Polk and the last few months are night and day.
“I feel bad for any school that was up for closure,” she said. “I didn’t want any school to close, but with the northwest side being less populated than the southeast side, it didn’t make sense. I don’t think it’s right.”