Several people spoke Monday at the Wichita Board of Education meeting to urge board members not to move forward with a plan to close four elementary schools.
District administrators are recommending closing four elementary schools as soon as next spring: L’Ouverture, OK, Pleasant Valley and Woodland. They say the buildings are deteriorating due to age and have become too costly to repair.
But many who spoke in public forum on Monday say they fear losing their neighborhood schools. They say having schools nearby means shorter commutes, a stronger sense of community and easier access to school events for students and families.
Aaron Andrews is a father whose kids go to OK Elementary, near 13th and West. He presented board members with a petition against the proposed closings, which he says has between 600 and 700 signatures.
“We are not supporting any more school closures,” he said. “These (signatures) are potential voters; these are folks in the community that do not agree. And we’re going to keep going.”
Trish Hileman, president of Wichita Independent Neighborhoods, says people in Wichita care deeply about their schools and want more opportunities to collaborate with the district on plans for school buildings.
“That work may ultimately confirm some closures, or it may reveal other plans (and) paths,” she said. “But either way, it builds legitimacy – trust.”
District staff first recommended closing the four elementary schools in 2024, when the school board adopted a new Facilities Master Plan.
But after voters rejected a bond issue last year, district leaders recently proposed a new timeline, which would have L’Ouverture and Woodland closing sooner than previously recommended.
The failed bond proposal would have included an early childhood center. Administrators are preparing another proposal to bring to the board for the November election, and many of the same projects could be in the new proposal.
Superintendent Kelly Bielefeld says the district is not abandoning neighborhood schools as a concept.
“When there’s fewer kids living in a neighborhood, and we have the size of schools we have, we can’t keep that many schools open,” he said. “They’re still neighborhood schools, they’re just neighborhood schools with a bigger boundary than they used to have.”
“And I’m not trying to discount that it’s hard; I understand the challenge that that is.”
The board was originally set to vote Monday on the proposed timeline for closing schools, but board president Stan Reeser deferred the vote because members Amy Jensen, Melody McCray-Miller and Ngoc Vuong were absent.
How does the district measure a building’s condition?
The district uses a measure called FCI — short for Facility Condition Index — to measure the relative condition of buildings, as well as how much it would cost the district to repair them. Administrators say about 68% of students in the district attend a school with a negative FCI rating.
District administrators say that statistic is one factor behind the decision to recommend closing and consolidating some schools. They also point to it as evidence for the need for a bond issue.
Josh Frederick, who spoke at Monday’s meeting, says the buildings are in poor condition due to years of neglect.
“Fifty to 100 years of deferred work (is) being modeled as if they all need to be done at once, and then closures are implied as the only rational response,” he said. “That isn’t engineering; that’s budget-storytelling.”
District staff also say that consolidating some smaller elementary schools would provide a more equitable learning environment for students across the district.
Stephen Christian, chief human resources officer for Wichita schools, said some schools are operating without full-time support staff, such as school nurses, counselors and speech language therapists.
“We’re splitting resources to try to keep a small-school model alive, and that comes with a cost,” he said.
Also on Monday, the board voted to finalize the closure of Chester I. Lewis Academic Learning Center in northeast Wichita. The 75-year-old building was home to the district’s alternative high school.
The district moved operations at Chester Lewis to the former Cleaveland Elementary School in southwest Wichita after learning of unsafe conditions there.
Several members of the public have spoken at board meetings to ask that the district use Chester Lewis’ name for a future project in the building’s surrounding neighborhood. Lewis was a key figure in the landmark Dockum Drug Store sit-in in Wichita during the Civil Rights Movement.
The district says Lewis’ name is still officially attached to the alternative school program and that it is open to using the name for a future project.
