Tacoma school closure concerns expressed

Franklin Elementary School teacher Tracy Knight spent hundreds of dollars of her own money last year on a schoolyard garden. Her students – part of a special program for autistic kids – love working in the dirt, watering the budding plants and watching their garden grow.

Now Knight fears the relationships the garden has helped cultivate will be uprooted.

Franklin, in central Tacoma, is one of three low-enrollment elementary schools being considered for closure by Tacoma Public Schools in the fall. The other two are McKinley, on the East Side, and Wainwright, in Fircrest.

The move is part of a plan to shrink the district’s budget as a result of state cuts to education that are likely to emerge from the current legislative session.

At a community meeting this week, Knight urged school officials to search for ways to bridge the budget gap “to make less of an impact on our children.”

An earlier proposal to close Foss High School was met with stiff public opposition, and the school district appears to have taken it off the table. Now elementary school advocates are starting to rally in hopes their programs also can be saved.

School officials project they will face a $13.1 million budget shortfall next year stemming from the state budget crisis and the end of federal stimulus funding. Superintendent Art Jarvis has proposed spending a portion of district savings, slashing spending by at least $1 million, increasing elementary school class sizes and consolidating elementary schools.

District officials estimate they will save $1.5 million by closing three elementary schools, each with an enrollment of fewer than 300 students. Jarvis says the savings will come not from mothballing buildings, but from eliminating administrative and support jobs.

The district plan would send students from Franklin, McKinley and Wainwright to nearby schools. It would also move the Bryant Montessori program, which has children preschool through eighth grade, from a school on Tacoma’s Hilltop to the newer Franklin building.

Bryant, a magnet school that draws students from throughout the district, had 336 students as of October.

Some Bryant parents say they like the idea because it would move their children from an older building to a school that was built about a decade ago.

Franklin students could apply for the Montessori program, but it has a waiting list. Otherwise, they would be divided between DeLong and Stanley elementary schools.

Reaction to the elementary closure plan has come from both staff and parents at the affected schools.

At Wainwright, a historic school in that opened in 1911, backers say it’s wrong to close their successful school. They met this week with school board member Debbie Winskill.

“We are one of the few schools in the district that has met our AYP continually,” said teacher Jane Wyckoff. She was referring to Adequate Yearly Progress, a measurement required by federal law based on how well schools improve on reading and math test scores from year to year.

Only 13 of Tacoma’s 37 elementary schools reached their AYP targets in the 2009-10 school year. Wainwright and Franklin were among them.

Wainwright teachers say part of their student population is a shifting one, with children arriving and leaving during the school year. But they say other students come from other parts of the school district because they like Wainwright’s warm atmosphere and academic record.

The school also houses a program for highly capable fourth- and fifth-graders. Many come from Tacoma’s North End.

“We have parents choose us because we are small and because they want a strong academic program,” said first grade teacher Darlene Wiggins.

“Our kids are soaring in this school,” said second-grade teacher Nancy Berggren. “To hurt our school and take our children, I think would be devastating.”

Winskill said the district has looked at small schools for closure, but the school board also wants to ensure that one part of the district doesn’t bear the brunt of cuts. That’s why school officials pulled back from an original list of six low-enrollment schools. Several of them serve the city’s East Side, where elementary populations are predicted to grow in the future.

Tim Herron, a parent of students at Bryant who lives in the neighborhood, said he’s concerned about how all the movement of students around the city under the proposed plan would affect students.

He says enrollment policies at Bryant limit access to the program by neighborhood children.

Even if the district guaranteed transportation for all current Bryant-area students to Franklin, he said, he worries the disruption would accelerate the decline of both minority and low-income kids that Tacoma’s only public Montessori school has seen over the past decade.

“I think there are some very important conversations to be had about the equity of these plans and whether they align with the district’s stated goals of closing the achievement gap,” he wrote in an e-mail to The News Tribune. “I am not hearing conversations around the decisions in light of these objectives.”

Debbie Cafazzo: 253-597-8635 debbie. cafazzo@thenewstribune.com

Voice your opinions

Two more community meetings are set to discuss possible Tacoma school closures and consolidations. The Tacoma School Board meets next on Thursday.

Monday, 6-7:30 p.m., at First Creek Middle School Commons. Aimed at McKinley, Blix, Lyon, Roosevelt and Park Avenue school communities. Under the district proposal, McKinley would close and its students reassigned to Blix and Lyon. A small part of the northeast Blix attendance area would shift to Roosevelt. The special programs now at Park Avenue Center would move to the McKinley building. (A concurrent meeting with a Spanish language interpreter will be held in the school’s art room.)

March 15, 6-7:30 p.m., at Geiger Elementary. Aimed at Geiger, Hunt and Foss school communities. The district plan proposes several options:

(1) Temporary relocation of Geiger to the former Hunt Middle School site while a new Geiger is built. (2) Postpone construction of a new Geiger; consider building a preschool-through-grade -eight Montessori school on the vacant Hunt site. (3) Do not build a new Hunt as planned. Instead, expand Foss High School to serve grades six through 12.