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Pikes Peak Schools: Divided We Teach

Posted on: Wednesday, 12 October 2005, 03:00 CDT

By BRIAN NEWSOME THE GAZETTE

Call it the Pikes Peak Unified School District.

It would span 847 square miles and serve nearly 98,000 students from Fountain to Monument, Manitou Springs to Falcon.

Instead of 47 school board members, there would be five. Instead of nine central offices, there would be one.

Area superintendents might oversee different sections of the unified district, but they'd answer to one boss.

Far-fetched? Maybe to parents who have pledged their allegiance to their neighborhood school district.

But it's not such a stretch. Much of the urban area is served by a single Police Department and Fire Department. In fact, this area's patchwork of school districts is an anomaly. El Paso County has 15 school districts, more than any other county in the state.

Nine are in the Colorado Springs area. Some of their boundaries wind seemingly at random through parts of town.

They range from 1,300 students to 30,000. Some districts are shrinking, some growing. Some are wealthy, some poor.

A wave of school-district consolidations swept across Colorado and much of the nation in the 1950s and 1960s, but most El Paso County districts stayed independent.

School and community leaders didn't want big government, said Morris Danielson, a former state education official who wrote a report on schooldistrict organization. Local control was more important to them than potentially saving money or gaining programs.

Decades later, 20 counties, including Jefferson and Denver, have only one district. This area's resistance to bureaucracy remains, and many people are glad the Pikes Peak region bucked the trend.

A single Colorado Springs-area school district would be a doomsday scenario for public education, they say. A crushing blow to competition, choice and local control. A setback for student achievement.

"I shudder to think what would happen if we're all under one district," said Debie Bennett, a 31-year teaching veteran who retired from Manitou Springs School District 14 last spring.

Under a unified district, some people fear, educational programs would become generic. The price tag of a big bureaucracy would exceed savings from an economy of scale. The competitive spirit would die, and with it, the motivation to experiment with education and retain students.

Yet many of the same people concede the assortment of school districts breeds inequality and inefficiencies.

In a unified district, money from affluent areas such as Monument and Cheyenne Mountain could help schools in the southeast, where several thousand children are eligible for the federal program for free and reduced-price lunches, the chief indicator of poverty.

Schools crowded by rapid growth in northeast Colorado Springs would be the whole region's responsibility, not a problem for a few thousand homeowners in Falcon School District 49.

In-district experts could be dispatched to help improve struggling schools, and teachers would find more advancement opportunities.

"Is it possible to manage a large district effectively? I think the answer is yes," said Cindy Stevenson, superintendent of the state's largest district, Jefferson County, or Jeffco, west of Denver. "Does it take a lot of work to get there? Yes."

School-district consolidation is a familiar topic for educators, scholars and politicians across the country. Several state legislatures have pushed for their districts to merge. No one has recently proposed consolidation locally, administrators say, but people often ask: Why are there so many districts?

"There is no universal agreement on the ideal size for schools or districts," reads the executive summary of a 2003 analysis of consolidation by the Louisiana Department of Education. That state concluded consolidation efforts could be "costly diversions" with no solid basis to believe they would improve education, save money or equal the playing field.

Many teachers, administrators and parents embrace the Colorado Springs smorgasbord of school districts. The will remains strong to preserve neighborhood identities that inspired the region's resistance to consolidation.

The unusual patchwork gives citizens easier access to their school boards and administrators -- "the last bastion of local control," a school official said.

Teachers and administrators say they have more flexibility to tailor school programs to the needs of their communities than they would in larger districts.

For example, Harrison School District 2, where student mobility is high, instituted a uniform curriculum for its schools so that students can move from one to another without changing content or teaching methods, said Assistant Superintendent Larry Sargent. That would be tougher to accomplish in a large urban district, he said.

Roy Crawford, superintendent for the 1,333-student Manitou Springs School District 14, prides himself on knowing every teacher, parent and student in his district.

"The central office isn't some mystical place," he said.

Paul Bryant, former D-49 school-board president, says he has helped solve problems for families he never would have met in a large district. When one student's parents deployed to Iraq and left her with an aunt, Bryant helped them work out guardianship issues to get the child in school fast.

But that same intimate involvement can mire districts in minutiae, said Ken Hoover, Jeffco's chief operations officer.

"You can have board members (in smaller districts) weighing in on the personality of a teacher's aide in a thirdgrade classroom," Hoover said.

Five board members in Jeffco represent roughly 530,000 people. Policy changes take longer -- simply making an announcement to the schools can be a major feat for the superintendent's secretary -- but the school board is less susceptible to special interests, administrators say.

Jeffco was the 34th-largest district in the nation in 2002-2003, according to a study on the 100 largest school districts by the National Center for Education Statistics. Stevenson and Hoover note that areas within Jeffco such as Evergreen, with the nation's highest income per capita, share the wealth with poor areas in the Sheridan Corridor.

Here, the school-district patchwork divides -- and defines -- sections of the Pikes Peak region.

Home buyers shop for districts, not schools, said Jo Ann Friedly, a longtime area real estate agent. They often pay thousands more to cross a district line -- occasionally in the same neighborhood. Homes in popular school districts sell more quickly than similar homes in districts next door.

Districts have responded with promotional campaigns aimed at attracting more students and the state money that follows them.

Friedly thinks it's ultimately the individual school that matters, but parents often come to her with their minds made up about a school district. One family was convinced Academy was the district for their child, only to find none of its schools had the automotive program they'd hoped for.

The hodgepodge of districts raises questions about equality, educators say.

Some schools are half- to a quarter-empty in Colorado Springs School District 11, the region's largest. Meanwhile, in fast- growing northeast Colorado Springs, some schools serve twice as many students as they were built for in Falcon School District 49.

D-49 is using about 130 portable classrooms this year, and some teachers work like nomads, moving from room to room with all their supplies on carts.

The number of school districts can also be downright confusing.

School buses for D-11 and D-49 cross paths at Constitution Avenue and Powers Boulevard. A few traffic lights away, D-20 buses roll through the southern section of the Academy District.

Along Baptist Road, between Colorado Springs and Monument, a Lewis-Palmer School District 38 middle school sits less than two miles from a D-20 elementary school.

"You can throw a rock from Creekside Middle School to Antelope Trails," said Nanette Anderson, a D-20 spokeswoman.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0198 or bnewsome@gazette.com

Staff writer Shari Chaney Griffin contributed to this report.

CENTRAL DISTRICTS

Academy District 20 19,825 students, 26 schools

Cheyenne Mountain District 12 4,475 students, nine schools

Colorado Springs District 11 31,421 students, 61 schools

Falcon District 49 10,072 students, 14 schools

Fountain-Fort Carson District 8 5,963 students, 10 schools

Harrison District 2 10,707 students, 23 schools

Lewis-Palmer District 38 5,610 students, nine schools

Manitou Springs District 14 1,333 students, four schools

Widefield District 3 8,508 students, 16 schools

MORE ONLINE: To find out more about your school district and others in the region, check out our new popup map at gazette.com.

Source: Gazette, The; Colorado Springs, Colo.

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