A multigenerational group of more than two dozen parents, educators and community leaders gathered Monday evening inside Pagosa Springs Middle School (PSMS) to begin mapping a vision for the future of educational spaces in Archuleta School District (ASD).
The group, the Master Plan Advisory Committee (MPAC), will ultimately be tasked with making a formal recommendation to the ASD Board of Education about what to do with several of the district’s aging buildings and facilities, including the elementary, middle and high schools.
“In the next four months we really need to learn a lot and really make some recommendations that the school board can consider for next options,” MPAC chair Lisa Scott said.
The committee began that process Monday by hearing reports and examining survey data describing the condition of the district’s schools, which were evaluated and scored by RTA Architects, a Colorado Springs-based firm hired to help facilitate ASD’s master planning process.
“You are going to tell me and us what will be the best way to move forward,” said ASD Superintendent Rick Holt, who summarized some of the questions facing the room: should the school district continue to maintain its existing properties and, if so, which ones, and at what price?
“Should we take a right and continue the way we have, or should we take a left and invest in schools?” Holt asked.
According to 166 survey responses collected at community meetings held last fall, Holt reported the feedback so far has directed the district to “invest in schools.”
But with more than 14,000 people living in Archuleta County, the relatively small sample of response was indicative of what Holt called the “challenge that we all have about getting the word out and making sure that everyone has accurate information in their hand.”
He noted, “It’s going to be a challenge for us to do that.”
Preliminary findings
In draft data sets projected inside the middle school library, Pagosa Springs Elementary School and the middle school buildings both received failing grades when evaluated for what RTA calls “educational adequacy.”
Helping define that term are more than 200 different metrics, which RTA later compiled to arrive at a measure of the buildings’ educational functionality and efficiency.
Using RTA’s point scoring system, the elementary scored 463 points out of a possible 840, essentially failing in areas that evaluated property boundaries and traffic flow, outdoor spaces and amenities, classrooms and team areas, as well as in safety and security.
Scored in many of the same areas, PSMS also performed poorly, earning 511 points out of a possible 924. RTA scored the school’s property boundaries and traffic flow, as well as its outdoor spaces and amenities, especially low, reporting those areas as functioning at 34 and 48 percent of optimal adequacy.
Pagosa Springs High School (PSHS) outperformed both the elementary and middle schools in RTA’s assessment, scoring 694 points out of a possible 944, earning a “C” average across the metrics.
RTA found PSHS could improve its signage, accessibility and furniture, and pointed to the school’s lack of an auxiliary gym for sports practices and physical education.
There are about $29 million worth of “urgent needs” among the three schools, according to RTA, with about $19.6 million worth of those found in the elementary school.
RTA defines an urgent need as any item that “has failed or will fail within the next year or is not in code compliancy.”
Those data points align with the collected survey responses, according to ASD and RTA.
“We asked how urgently [respondents] felt like issues at each of the schools should be addressed,” RTA’s Brian Calhoun said of the survey. “You can see very quickly that all the issues that we identified at the elementary school, respondents felt like they should be urgently addressed.”
Using the same scoring method, there are about $35.6 million worth of “important needs” RTA identified among the structures — $13.1 million at the elementary school, $17.7 million at PSMS and $4 million at PSHS.
RTA added up about $15.4 million in “necessary improvements” (indicating an item “has failed or is serviceable, but does not affect student achievement”) and another $8.3 million for “beneficial and long term improvements,” meaning items that require “attention in a longterm approach.”
Changing families
School demographer Shannon Bingham further framed some of the complexities facing the MPAC as it begins to chart a course through the data presented.
“There’s a lot of things changing in the world of families and parents nationally that are affecting communities all over the western U.S.,” said Bingham, a longtime demographer practicing in the state. “One of the things that haven’t changed very much in this community are its school buildings.”
In his presentation, Bingham referred to the general area encompassing ASD as a resort community, with the three largest population cohorts belonging to residents between the ages of 60 and 74 years old.
Following the seniors, residents between the ages of 30 and 49 made up the next largest cohort, followed next by school-aged children between the ages of 5 and 19.
The preschool cohort was among the smallest across all age groups from under 5 to 85 years and older.
Those numbers, along with dramatic declines in birthrates for the past five years, lead Bingham to suggest that Archuleta County’s school-age population could remain relatively stable for the foreseeable future with one important caveat —affordability.
“That is one of the prime determinants of how many school-age children we should expect,” Bingham said.
He continued, “This community has always done an incredibly good job of maintaining its affordability. Affordability is part of the vocabulary of all the planners that affect this community.”
And while that fluency has “helped us hang on to having a certain amount of children in the community,” according to Bingham’s count, “in general we have lost kids,” he said. “If we don’t continue to build affordable housing, we will continue to lose kids.”
Bingham pointed to new housing developments currently under construction in the area that are being built with low- and moderate-income households in mind, calling them a hopeful sign of future enrollment stability.
Those developments have the potential to “backfill the losses that we will experience from this generational change, and hopefully hold the enrollment levels of most of our schools about at what it is now,” Bingham said.
Next steps
Throughout Monday’s presentations, members of the MPAC and others in the audience appeared eager to support what ASD and its partners assured the group is not a foregone conclusion.
“We don’t have a predetermined solution at this point. We don’t have a predetermined timeline of when things are going to occur,” RTA’s Doug Abernathy said. “We really need your feedback as a community in order to drive this direction.”
That feedback began arriving almost immediately, with MPAC members and others in attendance questioning the district about potential costs to replace certain buildings and wondering how to navigate a sense of “campaign fatigue” lingering over the community.
“What I care about is quality of the teachers,” Leonard Martinez said. “If our facilities are preventing the high-quality teachers that we’ve had in Pagosa … then we’re failing our kids in that way.”
Jeff Fuller, a “recovering superintendent” from Arizona, agreed, and asked how addressing the school buildings might impact the community’s future.
“I’m looking at the future of the community and what’s good for kids,” Fuller said. “That’s the whole future of our society. What are we doing for them? And is this it?”
Those questions and more will all be explored over the next four months as the committee parses RTA’s data and hears from the larger ASD community, according to Scott.
“We’re going to talk about school funding, bond capacity, our academic performance” and more, Scott said.
She added the MPAC will aim to formalize its recommendation to the ASD Board of Education by May, with additional MPAC meetings scheduled for February, March and April.
“All of that will take us to cost and what this is going to look like,” she said.
garrett@pagosasun.com