School Consolidation and Boundary Committee Update

As many of you know by now, the PUSD Board of Education has appointed a School Consolidation and Boundary Committee. This is an advisory committee that will provide a menu of options and recommendations to the superintendent by January 2018. An outside facilitator, Cooperative Strategies, is facilitating the process in addition to providing the committee with background data and working in coordination with demographers so that any recommendations will not only consider the current state of PUSD, but the future impact.

During our meeting last night, we reviewed the initial results of the survey that is now available on Survey Monkey. You can complete the survey in English or Spanish now at https://www.pusd.us/Page/6792 . Committee members will receive all surveys and your comments, so we encourage you to participate. Your input is vital to this process

.We’ve reviewed student mobility, birth rates, attendance info, capture rates, and estimated enrollment and capacity data for this year and projecting out five years. We acknowledged that capacity numbers do not include specialized learning environments, labs, studios, parent rooms or rooms that are needed for other purposes. As a result, we agreed that we would consider a school at capacity if it is 75% – 85% full.

We’re doing a lot of talking about our values and priorities. We’ve pretty much agreed that providing robust educational programs for all children is our guiding principle. We plan to develop at least three options… one that will have high impact in terms of reducing operational costs, medium impact, and low impact. We are considering everything, and the committee has no directive to consider or not consider specific schools.

For more information, here is the link to PUSD’s School Consolidation and Boundary Committee page. https://www.pusd.us/Page/6792 .

nancy dufford