As Tracy Dorland became the superintendent of Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado in 2021, the district was facing some big challenges. She arrived on the heels of an emergency closure of an elementary school because it was underused.

Soon after, the forced closure of another school triggered Dorland to initiate a plan to combat the “urgent widespread declines” in enrollment in Jeffco, as she called it. Declining enrollment has forced Jeffco to close 21 schools since 2021.  

Dorland shared how she developed a strategic capital master plan to eliminate the chances for another emergency closure during a Saturday session at the AASA national conference. The session titled “Facing Declining Enrollment by Building a Road Map for Enrollment Management and Capital Planning” featured a collection of speakers working with or for Jeffco to tackle the issue of declining enrollment.

To assess boundary lines and maximize the use of school buildings, Jeffco brought on Rebecca Loach, a project manager, and Kate Doiron, a senior analyst, with FLO Analytics, a data analytics firm.

They worked with Lisa Relou, Jeffco’s chief of staff, and Claire Takhar, Jeffco’s executive director of strategic initiatives.

What they found was that 18 schools in the 2023-24 school year were underutilized, Loach said. Colorado has a choice law that allows parents to choose the schools their kids attend, which made simply just changing boundary lines not enough.

“We knew that just simply telling people this is your new school boundary line was not going to increase enrollment in those schools,” Loach said.

Taxpayers also were outraged that they helped fund millions of dollars in renovations to school buildings, which were now closing, Loach said. That voter anger triggered the board to ask for a demographic study.

Using FLO, Doiron analyzed program locations, enrollment trends, location trends of families and choice analysis. These data sets allowed them to create a utilization projection analysis and a new boundary model, she said.

As districts consider the use of their own facilities, Loach recommended districts follow three steps. Know your school’s utilization capacity and trusting the way it’s measured, she recommended. Encourage educators to understand your state’s school choice policy along with who controls students’ ability to transfer to different school, she said. Districts also should track enrollment projections to ensure every department has the latest data, Loach said.

Using these recommendations can mitigate inefficiencies and increase focus on deserving areas, Takhar added. For example, through FLO they discovered inefficiencies in their bus routes and overlapping boundary lines.

“We were sending two different bus drivers on two different routes into a couple of square blocks to pick up kids,” she said. “We had weird little spots in our district where someone had drawn overlapping boundary lines.”

At the core of this initiative, Dorland expressed her desire to leave Jeffco with a structure in place to minimize future emergencies and misuse of funds that affect students. She highlighted that she had to make the executive decision to close schools to begin a new proactive approach to managing the district.

“It has to be coming from a place of heart that you’re doing this for the best interest of kids,” she said. “You’ve got to get your message down about that.”

(Mohammad Tantawi, a senior journalism major at Louisiana State University, is an intern reporter with Conference Daily Online.)