Can consolidate preschools with elementary, to avoid closures?
Dear Bellevue School District,
Consolidating preschools into elementary schools provides the state-recommended 400-student minimum you need.
Learn from the local private schools that are eating BSD’s lunch and consider moving preschools into under-full empty elementary schools. Private schools understand that this leads to sticky behavior.
Isn’t this a simple way to ensure that schools efficiently maintain a population of >400?
Its excellent preschool likely saved Phantom Lake from closure, which clearly benefitted from the efficiency of sharing staff, library, nurses, counselors, gym staff, …. etc… with the preschool.
Sticky behavior is why PLE’s lower grades grew last year — PLE is very comfortable way above 400 students *if** its preschool is included, and it’s growing … which the administration, for a long, time, absurdly argued should not be part of the equation).
While I don’t like moving preschools around, it’s certainly much less disruptive to change the location of new enrollments than uprooting students and closing communities in already established elementary schools. The efficiency of co-hosting a preschool has been pointed out to the district many many times, and yet the district continued to claim that PLE was at 50% capacity. Maddening.
Schools may need to be remodeled to accommodate preschooler needs. This is good news! This is capital investment — which BSD can use bond money for, or funding by selling some of its enormous stock of properties.
Perhaps it’s past time that BSD understands and acknowledges that the enrollment loss has been to local private schools (BSD recently told Denise Whitaker that they can’t confirm it — WHAT!!!), and, more importantly, understand WHY we are losing enrollment to private! Recently, *the district* has been driving families to private schools. I now treat this as an objective fact: existing and incoming families are CHOOSING to spend $20–30k to prefer to go to local private schools instead of attending BSD.
I include below my recent letter to Dr Aramaki on the need to understand the loss to local private schools.
I (and others) have written to you before on the (pretty convincing, but I agree, not quite certain) evidence of the loss to local private schools:
https://stuart-reynolds.medium.com/bellevue-where-have-all-the-children-gone-4bcc0041f3a9
https://mostlywashington.substack.com/
I’ve written to you in the past on the absurdity of ignoring preschool efficiency: https://stuart-reynolds.medium.com/phantom-lake-elementary-why-are-you-50-full-e5676a559b9
From the district’s website:
It seems the district has far higher demand for preschools than it provides. Further evidence of this is also seen in the very large number of private preschools in Bellevue. Again, to labor the point, BSD itself, here again, driving parents to private schools by providing insufficient preschool. Many of those parents who went to private preschool will stick with private in K-5.
It’s past time BSD lifted its head out of the sand and serve the students, no matter how personally difficult and embarrassing the causes of enrollment loss may be. Ignoring your role in enrollment loss is footgun behavior — the present path and ignorance of local private school enrollment gains are driving more parents to private schools. It will continue if you do not understand the behavior of those parents and address their needs,
- Dr. Stuart Reynolds