The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Alternative school on the chopping block
As the hard realities of school budget cuts become known in the community, difficult decisions are making real impacts on students, teachers and administrators. The RE1J school board received a dose of reality Monday as a packed house confronted them at their meeting in Crested Butte. Those with a connection to the Gunnison Valley School, which serves at-risk students, came en masse to plead their case for saving the school’s independence.
The message to save the Gunnison Valley School was clear before stepping foot inside the board meeting Monday, April 4. Cars in the Crested Butte Community School parking lot had ‘Save GVS’ and the like scrawled on windows and a horde of people wearing t-shirts with the same message flowed from the Multi Purpose Room into the hall.
It was a change of scene at a meeting that often draws no more than a member or two of the general public. But the usual seating for a hundred wasn’t enough and in the back, someone was setting several more rows of elementary-sized chairs.
The crowd had gathered to confront the school board on a recommendation from the district’s Administrative Council (AdCo) that would cut a share of funding to the Gunnison Valley School, dramatically changing a 15-year run of giving at-risk students an alternative to the traditional high school education and setting.
The proposal, which is still just being considered, is part of a broad effort to offset the effects of an additional $332 million statewide cut in funding to K-12 education beyond what was recommended last November. That will mean $880,000 less than expected in funding for Gunnison schools next year.
Superintendent Jon Nelson said the cuts proposed by AdCo reach across the district and try to bring equity between the schools.
Overall, AdCo’s proposal would cut about six full-time equivalent positions from the district faculty ranks, affecting everything from adult literacy programs to high school counseling and middle school electives.
But the part of the proposal that has gotten the most attention is the part that would close Gunnison Valley School as a separate site while continuing to offer its alternative education at the high school.
The GVS building was finished last year at a cost of nearly $2 million adjacent to the high school with proceeds from the bond sale approved by voters in 2008.
Nelson said he wasn’t sure what the district would do with the building if the AdCo proposal were accepted, but that it would continue to be used by the district in some capacity.
“Every site and program has been looked at. Programs that cost the district have been proposed to be reduced or eliminated. The proposal calls for some staff members across the district to have their jobs reduced or eliminated,” Nelson said. “How we do business at each site is going to look radically different.”
But Nelson thinks AdCo has looked at every conceivable way of trimming the budget and says the whole proposal stands, barring any change of direction requested by the school board. That doesn’t mean people with concerns about the cuts won’t be heard.
People from the community who had seen the alternative education offered at GVS work and change lives over the years weren’t going to let the school, or its students, get quietly swept aside.
There was a long list of people who wanted to speak to the board on behalf of the school and success of the program.
There were several former students who are now working toward advanced degrees in a wide range of fields. Without GVS and the alternative it offered, the stories went, they might have dropped out of school and never reached their potential.
According to more than a dozen students that spoke, the school is a family consisting of different kinds of people that can appreciate each other’s differences. They never fit in at the high school, they said, getting bullied or picked on for being unique. Then they found GVS and were taught, as the school’s headmaster and lead advocate Neil Coen said, to “always add value, never take the easy path and always leave things better than you found them.”
Maxims like those have become part of the fabric of the school, Coen said, and they’re things all GVS students can fall back on when faced with difficult situations.
Most of the adages were offered to the school board members before they set out to make the difficult decision about the future of GVS. Coen even offered to sell one of the shirts to Nelson…for only $266,000, the amount of GVS’ operating budget.
“Our greatest concern tonight that brings us to the board was a proposal that was made with no discussion or involvement from myself, as the headmaster, or any of my staff,” Coen told the board. “That recommendation was for closure of our school.”
While Coen sat on the district’s Administrative Council for a year, it wasn’t this year, and the point was made repeatedly that no one had ever asked anyone at the school to offer a solution.
“We just want to be asked so we can participate in this process,” Coen said to the board members. “And I would suggest to you that before this meeting, and before the crisis and before the challenges that got thrown on us, already my staff was working cooperatively with people in this community to have a complete vision that could very well generate significant revenue for this district. But nobody asked…Let us participate with you in the short time that we have to come up with ideas.”
He continued, “That’s the great thing about crisis. This community has risen up in ways to delight, and astonish and humble me.”
When GVS found itself in a budget crunch a few years ago, the school’s leadership made the decision to forfeit custodial services to save money. “Now the students that go to that school clean the toilets. I clean toilets, and I’m okay with that,” Coen said. “Have you seen the custodial budget for the district? Just saying.”
One of the school’s teachers offered to work for free next year, if it meant the school could stay open. He said in talking with the family of a former student, he was offered a donation of $50,000 for the cause.
But teaching at-risk kids in a separate facility is expensive. The per-pupil operating cost of Gunnison Valley School is $10,242, or nearly twice that of other sites, Nelson said. The average per pupil funding of the other sites is $5,690. Closing the school is projected to save the district $157,000 a year.
“We would need some type of funding from that savings to continue the alternative services through the high school,” Nelson said. “We’re looking at about $109,000 for that. How that programming will look has yet to be determined.”
But it was pointed out that the numbers look so lop-sided now, as per-pupil funding across the district has plummeted. Five years ago, when the state was providing a bigger share of the funding, the gap wasn’t so wide.
And the long term cost savings to the community were clear in the example of one family that had twins heading in the same direction. One of them spoke of the school’s success at the meeting. The other is in jail.
“One of the most important things that I want the board to grab a hold of is that you’re teaching these kids tonight,” Coen said. “Don’t teach them they’re just numbers to be compared. Don’t teach them that they’re the most expendable group of people in this district. They came to my school believing that.
“We struggled very hard to break that cycle. My kids are ready to make sacrifices. No illusions about what’s in front of us. Don’t teach them as a group that they are expendable, dismissible,” Coen said, his voice quivering. “Because they are not.”
The room erupted in a standing ovation. When it died down, all that could be heard in a moment of silence was a sniffling audience and it seemed someone in every row was pushing aside a tear.
But the emotion didn’t seem to sway the school board much, as their job remains largely unchanged: find a way to keep the school budget in the black next year. Members of AdCo are meeting weekly to discuss budgeting options and will adjust the budget according to the school board’s wishes, as much as possible. A final decision will have to be made with enough time for the administration to put a budget together by May.
“At this point we think we’ve looked at all the possibilities,” Nelson said. “If the board gives us a different direction, I don’t know what we would do.”
