Fox C-6 school officials are considering the possibility of closing one of its 11 elementary schools to improve the district’s financial situation.
During the April 9 Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Paul Fregeau briefly reviewed 10 factors that would be examined to determine if the district needs to close a school.
He said those factors include a school’s operational costs, transportation situation, site issues, capacity, projected space use, facility condition, ability for students to safely walk to the building, the building’s layout, expansion potential and how middle school and high school enrollment would be impacted by the closure of an elementary school.
Fregeau said the district plans to seek community feedback and hold meetings about a possible school closure next fall after the 2024-2025 school year begins.
The Fox district recently completed a series of public meetings focused on the possibility of switching to a four-day school week to save money. Fregeau said the earliest Fox would shift to a four-day week would be the 2025-2026 school year.
Fregeau said it’s a difficult choice to close a school.
“That is a tough discussion,” he said. “I have been through boundary changes and school closures. They are super emotional.”
Fregeau did not provide an estimate for how much the district would save by closing a school, but he said a closure would improve the budget in two ways.
“It is the operational side, and it comes off our inventory for (capital projects) expenditures,” he said.
Fregeau said the district needs to spend about $150 million in capital improvements at buildings around the district, and by closing a school that figure could be reduced by $10 million to $20 million.
He said school officials need to find sustainable budget reductions because they anticipate the district losing about $5 million in state funding for the 2024-2025 school year.
He said the cut in funding will result from the state requiring districts to start using their current student attendance numbers as part of the funding formula instead of the pre-COVID-19 enrollment numbers from the 2019-2020 school year they have been allowed to continue using for the past four school years.
Fregeau said a decline in enrollment and the likely end of some state and federal funding could put the Fox district in a potential financial hole.
The Fox district’s budget projections show its fund balance dwindling to $3.9 million by 2027. That would be about 2.57 percent of Fox’s annual operating costs, and it would put the district at risk of losing accreditation and being taken over by the state.
Before the start of this school year, Fox reduced its salary costs by about $2.4 million by eliminating two assistant principal positions and 27 teaching positions by attrition. The district also reduced the total budget for its buildings by $250,000.
School closure criteria
Fregeau said one of the top items to consider when closing a school is how safe it is for students to get to the building.
He said because of the shortage of bus drivers, schools that are easier to walk to likely would remain open over a school that requires more transportation services.
“Buildings that require a lot of transportation and are not very walkable, they move up (the list for potential closure),” Fregeau said. “That is one of the most overriding criteria. We have to get kids safely to the building.”
While considering a possible school closure, Fox officials will use information from a facility master plan that was completed last year by Cordogan Clark, a St. Louis architecture, engineering and construction firm.
The plan assessed each of the district’s buildings and demographics within its boundaries to predict future student enrollment. Cordogan Clark’s findings showed the district can expect enrollment to decrease by about 1,000 students over the next 10 years.
The plan also showed that most schools have proper classroom sizes for students, but nearly every building has size deficiencies, especially in common spaces, such as cafeterias, gyms and media centers or libraries.
Fregeau said the district cannot base a closure decision solely on the number of students currently enrolled at a school or the projected enrollment for a school. Instead, the district also has to determine which elementary schools could accommodate additional students, and how shifting elementary school boundaries would impact enrollment at the four middle schools and two high schools.
“It is a massive puzzle,” he said. “You are not just impacting the school you closed. The scaffolding effect impacts a lot of people.
“You have to look at classroom size. If we shift 20 second graders to a building, some buildings are able to accommodate that easier than other buildings that don’t have as much square footage. When you redraw boundaries, you have an imbalance at the middle schools that you can’t put all of the kids in one middle school. You don’t want to have 2,200 students in one (high school) and 1,500 in the other. That is all a part of it.”
Fregeau also said a school closure can be hard on families.
“You have families who had a brother, sister, cousin or an entire family who have gone to an elementary school for their entire life,” he said. “Families say, ‘I’m used to going to this school. I love that principal. I love that teacher. I was planning on my kid having that teacher. Now, you have taken that away.’ It is emotional.”
Fregeau said Fox officials are monitoring the proposed state budget and bills in the state Senate and House that would require districts to get voter approval to switch to a four-day week if they are in or partially in a charter county or city with more than 30,000 residents.
School districts may receive an increase in state funding per student if the current budget is approved. House Bill 2 shows the state increase spending per student to $6,760 in 2025 and then $7,145 in 2026.
The state currently spends $6,375 per student, which has not changed since 2020.
Bills in the state Senate and House that would require a public vote for school districts to move to a four-day week also offer additional money for teacher salary increases if a district has a five-day schedule.
“Those have a lot of different impact on public schools, and we want to see where that lands,” Fregeau said. “We also want to see how our current budget performs.”