Wenatchee School Board Meeting Sees Overflow Crowd, Many Speak Against Closing Columbia Elementary
Wenatchee School District officials project $3 million in annual savings from closing the school at the end of the year, and another $2.3 from schedule changes
More people showed up to the Jan. 23, 2024, Wenatchee School Board meeting than could fit in the building, so many stood on the sidewalks and steps of the District’s Support Services Building and watched a live stream of the events unfolding inside.
Most were there to protest the district’s recent announcement that it would close Columbia Elementary at the end of the school year. After a short presentation about the dire financial situation facing the district by Superintendent Kory Kalahar, the meeting was turned over to public comments, and for nearly three hours the people spoke.
“I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say this has been a rough week for all of our students, parents and all of Columbia staff,” Karina Avina said. “There has been anger, tears and a lot of grappling to understand why the Wenatchee School District would handle the release of such impactful information with absolute disregard for the community as a whole, but especially the disregard of our children at Columbia Elementary who have been subjected to unfair amounts of anxiety and stress. These kids deserve accountability from the school board.”
She said the loss of special services offered at Columbia, like the Transitional Kindergarten (or TK) program will negatively impact the community for years.
Avina’s daughter Abby was by her side and spoke after her mother.
“All of us students have gotten really close with our teachers,” she said. “And this is our school and we want to stay here.”
Before the meeting, I spoke with some of those teachers, including Marcy Wright and Natalie Lemons, TK teachers at Columbia.
“I’ve been a teacher with this district since 2004 and it’s very disheartening to feel so disrespected for my hard work over all those years,” Wright said.
She and her colleagues brought a teaching aid to help them communicate how the staff at Columbia has put a lot of work into building a metaphorical home for the students they serve.
You can listen to a clip of my interview with Wright, Lemons and Allwood here:
I also spoke with teachers Aaron Gahringer, Ann Young and Jocelyn Flitton, who has been teaching at Columbia for 26 years. Working a pair of knitting needles as she spoke, Clinton said she often has students who are second-generation Columbia Elementary students and personally taught their parents years ago. She said it speaks to how tight-knit the community around Columbia Elementary is and she doesn’t want to teach anywhere else. And she wondered where she would see her students after the school closes.
“I guess I will have to see them at Fred Meyer’s,” she said.
Young spoke about the reaction she has been seeing from the children she teaches. She said kids have “big emotions” at their age they, and they don’t how to process those feelings so they get upset.
“They are spontaneously combusting into tears throughout the day,” she said.
All three agreed the situation has disrupted learning in their classes. Young said it’s likely that disruption will continue into next year.
Gahringer said news about closing the school came “out of the blue” and the district hasn’t been “up front” about the rationale behind closing Columbia.
“I feel like we’ve been asking for some clarification about why Columbia and not other places and the best the district can do for us is that you’re under-enrolled,” he said. “That we’re in a prime location to move those kids to other places, that our school’s small and when you really dig into the data and look at that, I don’t think that’s the case.”
You can listen to my interview with the three of them here.
While the topic of closing Columbia Elementary was not on the Jan. 23 meeting agenda, the meeting offered school district officials the first chance to address the issue publicly since releasing the news in a press release on Saturday.
In his budget update at the beginning of the meeting, Sup. Kalahar laid out the financial situation the district is facing and the reasoning behind closing Columbia.
He said there are two main reason we’re in this situation. One is the the now-infamous “budget error” of June 2022 that occurred under the leadership of former Superintendent Paul Gordon.
“We realized there was an accounting error that resulted in a $9 million budgeting error,” he said. “We have worked hard to address that budgeting error this year and we will have to address the rest of those needs in coming years.”
The second reason are the annual ongoing impacts to the budget.
When it comes down to it, spending exceeds revenues. There are a few compounding reasons for that, Kalahar said. There are Federal ESSER dollars that will stop coming this year, regionalization dollars are decreasing and “local effort assistance” (LEA) dollars are also decreasing. Those LEA funds are going down because enrollment is decreasing and property values are increasing, so the state LEA decreases.
And then there’s the issue of enrollment. It’s down, and some of the things that contributed to that are Alcoa closing its Malaga plant in 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns, private and charter schools opening, increased housing costs, graduating classes larger than incoming classes and a decline in birth rates.
“Elementary consolidation” is unavoidable according to Kalahar and district officials.
So why close Columbia Elementary?
It’s a question many parents, teachers and students stood up and asked during the marathon public comment time.
But prior to the meeting I reached out to WSD Communications Director Diana Haglund with a few questions, and she responded promptly.
Here are my questions and her answers:
DB: How much will the district save from closing Columbia?
DH: At least $3 million annually.
DB: Are there any plans for what will be done with the school?
DH: We are in the process of evaluating how the school will be utilized by WSD programs.
DB: Is there a plan to sell the school and the land?
DH: The District has no intentions to sell the school or the land. When districts sell real estate, those funds go back into our capital projects fund and can't be spent on staffing or other areas.
DB: What is that real estate worth currently?
DH: I don't have this information.
DB: What other schools will absorb Columbia's students?
DH: We are currently evaluating which schools students will be reassigned to. All of our elementary have empty classrooms and capacity to varying degrees.
Here's a table that shows our enrollment declines at each building.
DB: And what will happen to the staff? Will those with seniority at Columbia displace teachers at other schools as they are absorbed into the district? That was something someone said at the Columbia PTO meeting last night, and I was curious about the veracity of that.
DH: Certificated staff will go through the internal transfer process, which allows them to choose a preferred school to transfer to based on availability and credentials. Some classified staff will also be transferred. Certificated staff moves will be partially determined by seniority, endorsements, and teaching experience. Certificated and classified staff moves will be made as a boundary change is finished and school schedules are determined.
DB: According to the OSPI website, Columbia students cost the most among the elementary schools in the district. Why is that?
DH: Schools like Lincoln and Columbia have higher per-pupil funding due to higher rates of students who qualify for state and federal programs.
Between closing Columbia and new high school and middle school schedules, the district can save $5.3 million dollars a year.
During his presentation, Sup. Kalahar said the decision to close the school is not a reflection on the school or its success.
The factors that led to the decision to close Columbia are the fact that there are currently nine classrooms not being used for grade-level classes, a lack of projected growth within Columbia’s boundary, a large decline in student enrollment, and the central location of the neighborhood allows for transportation of students to other schools.
“Columbia is the second smallest school by 11 students, about a 314 headcount,” he said.
According to OSPI data, Columbia has 340 students enrolled in the 2023-24 school year. So I followed up with Haglund and asked about that difference.
“The difference in enrollment is that 314 is just K-5, and 340 includes Transitional Kindergarten. We used the K-5 number because not all of our elementary schools have TK programs,” she wrote. “So, when we compare their enrollments, we leave out TK. Only Mission View and Columbia have TK programs.”
Closing Columbia minimizes the number of students and families impacted, according to the presentation slides.
But folks like Columbia teacher Ann Young and parent Bridget Myers say the district needs to look beyond the overall number of students this decision affects and think about who this decision impacts – namely poor and minority students. According to OSPI data, 268 of Columbia’s 340 students are from low income homes.
“You can’t sacrifice the education of the most vulnerable students to protect the education of the privileged students in this valley,” Young said. “It’s not right.”
Myers echoed that sentiment during her allotted three minutes at the podium during public comments time, and the last thing she said prompted a lengthy standing ovation from the crowd.
“This would never happen at Sunnyslope,” she said.
You can watch the entire meeting on the Wenatchee School District’s YouTube channel here.
That in-depth dashboard of the publicly-available OSPI data on WSD elementary schools was compiled by Karina Vega-Villa, PhD, and you can view that here.
Vega-Villa is an educator and technology policy fellow at the National Science Foundation. She has helped immensely with this story by providing this research tool. I would like to thank her for her work putting that dashboard together.
I plan on sitting down with Sup. Kalahar for an interview about this issue in the near future, and will write another piece about that when I do.
The details and the interview transcript in this article were very informative. Interesting that it was somehow framed that students at Columbia were "more expensive" when the interview response said that "they qualify for more state/federal support" which would indicate the opposite. I wouldn't think the local district would be on the hook for those subsidies.
I for one would like to hear more about the accounting error fro June 2022.