After considering a possible change in attendance boundaries during its May regular meeting, the Yuma School District One governing board has decided to table the action for the time being.
“The boundary changes has been pulled back so we’re not doing any changes to boundaries, any changes to schools,” Board President Keith Ware said. “We’re now going through a very detailed process of finding out what is going to be the best solution for the longest amount of time.”
He explained that the board wants to avoid making a lot of small changes along the way since they can present more disruptions to families.
“The important thing is that we need to research the issue that we have, find a solution that’s going to be more than one or two years,” he said. “We want a longer solution.”
The issue in question has been that of schools in the eastern part of the district hitting capacity as multiple housing developments are underway in East Yuma and more have been proposed to come. Because of the growth that’s already happened, Desert Mesa Elementary and Castle Dome Middle School have hit capacity, and they’ll be required to accept as many students who move into the attendance boundaries regardless.
Without the additional support of the $77 million bond the district had asked from voters in 2024, new options have to be considered. During a capital planning study session on Tuesday, May 27, the board discussed short-term and long-term solutions.
Short-term Solutions
There are three main solutions incoming superintendent Denis Ponder presented to the board.
Portable/additional classrooms: Review the availability of portable classrooms and construction of new classroom space at existing schools.
Ponder commented that Dorothy Hall Elementary is one school that would be a good candidate.
“Dorothy Hall was built with expansion in mind, so that's already built into the plans,” he said. “The utilities are already available. They're capped off right now, but all we would have to do is tap into those lines and build according to the plans that have already been designed, and that would probably be one of the cheaper additions that we could come up with right now just because the utilities are already set up for that.”
Renovations to repurpose existing spaces: Identifying spaces that can be repurposed into classroom space at larger schools in the east.
“Schools with large libraries, maybe that could become one classroom, maybe that becomes two classrooms," Ponder said. "We want to evaluate that because we don't want to lose all functionality of a library; we still want to have a library space or an option for kids to go to a library, but again that is an option that can be considered right now as the schools are quite crowded out east.”
Strategic boundary adjustments: Reviewing boundary adjustments that can alleviate capacity concerns in the east schools.
This was the idea behind the proposed attendance boundaries on Tuesday, May 13, and while that change has been tabled, the board may want to consider other boundary adjustments.
“In a perfect scenario, perfect world, a school gets built out east," Ponder continued. "We can add square footage, we can dissipate the tension and then we have one opportunity over a longer period of time to evaluate where everything is and draw lines that are the most appropriate for all the schools once we have a stronger indication of where that enrollment's going to be, what those trends are, what those shifts are going to be."
Making the Solutions Possible
In order to address overcrowding in District One's east schools, funds set aside for large capital projects may need to be reallocated. The two main projects Ponder brought up were bus purchases and furniture refreshes.
He explained that the district typically purchases school buses each year in order to keep bus ages as low as possible. They’ve almost reached their target range of 15 to 17 years, but the purchases can be scaled down. New furniture is also purchased each year, and by carrying over some fund balances, Ponder believes the district could set apart $2.5 million.
“I think we could comfortably come up with about two and a half million, which Chris Thompson (architect) felt like would build us somewhere between four and five rooms right now, so we could get about four or five classes a room,” he said.
One consideration the board will have to keep in mind, however, is that if the district builds new space using local money, the state won’t provide building renewal funding for maintenance or emergent issues that may arise in that space. The district will be fully responsible for those costs.
Long-term Solutions
The board is very interested in placing a bond measure on the ballot for November 2026, and there are three big changes they may explore in addressing overcrowding.
A new school: Construction of a new school in east Yuma–possibly around 10 E, just past Westwind RV & Golf Resort in the Foothills.
Ponder commented that the district could open a new school within five years if a bond passes in November.
Additional classrooms: Additional classrooms added to existing schools.
“It would take six classrooms to move the bubble through, but we get new revenue each year from those funds so we could still build those classrooms out as those children, as those bubbles move through,” Ponder told the board. “So if it wasn't all at Dorothy Hall, if you added classrooms somewhere else, you could add additional classrooms each year to move with that bubble. We could kind of stay ahead of that, too.”
He’s not certain on the timing yet, but he believes new classrooms could be operational within a year or two.
A K-8 magnet school: Renovation of two existing schools into a K-8 magnet school.
Ponder shared that the district has had conversations about combining Roosevelt Elementary and Fourth Avenue Junior High into a magnet school, which he thinks could be done by 2028 at the earliest.
“The idea would be to utilize funding, perhaps bond money, to do a front office somewhere in the gym/4th Avenue school area so it's central, can serve both campuses, remodel the current front offices to provide educational opportunities so whatever magnet direction we go, those spaces could be aligned with that,” he said. “And then there are some metal buildings I would love to get rid of and redo those as actual, like new, better functioning spaces for the ESS (Exceptional Student Services) students. The bathrooms you could have all that stuff kind of built into that space, which I think would be good too.”
Questions and Concerns
Although the board liked the long-term ideas, Ware said it would be critical for them to understand why parents are open-enrolling in other schools and what they really think of the different schools in the district.
In response, Board Member Cori Rico relayed some of the impressions parents have shared with her as a fellow parent in the district.
“These are parents coming to me and they're like, ‘How did you make that choice as a parent to send your kid to Gila Vista?’ and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and they're like, ‘It's in the ghetto,” she said. “And I mean, these are real conversations happening, yep: ‘It's in the ghetto,’ ‘I hear there's nothing but gangbangers there.’ I mean, these things that are, one, not accurate. So it's narratives. It's the area of town, the type of kids they think go there. They think they're different than the kids that are going to Castle Dome.”
Ware seconded the idea that the surrounding area may play a larger role in parents’ perceptions of schools.
“Because we had a parent stand up there and say, ‘Get a temporary building. I'll put my kid in a temporary building,’” he said. “So they're not leaving these schools because they don't have new carpet and fresh paint on the wall; there’s something else, and I don't think that it is the school itself.”
Dorothy Hall Principal Leeanne Lagunas and Rico also expressed concern about student retention with any changes the district makes. Lagunas noted that when Gwyneth Ham Elementary school closed, a good portion of its students left the district entirely even though the majority of them were supposed to attend C.W. McGraw Elementary instead.
Ware added that once a new school is built, it’ll create a vacuum as more parents will want to open enroll there, and the problem of hitting capacity may recur. He wants parent feedback to improve the schools so that all of them will be schools parents will be pleased having their children attend.
“They need to see the pluses that are in these jewel schools,” Board Member Jeff Stoner said. “You know, I've done school visits on all those schools – Pecan Grove and Carver and Rosevelt and those – they have a good program going on. When we were in those neighborhood meetings, there was a couple of parents that were talking statistics that those schools are ranked the lowest and that's why they don't want their kids going there.
“I would say that probably some of that answer to the reason why maybe it is ranking lower than the other schools is because the children that live in that part of town, the majority of them are Spanish speaking first and they're being taught in English and if you can't understand what you're being taught by the language barrier, how do you expect anybody to succeed and how do you expect the proficiency ratings to be up where they should be?”
Stoner said that the lesson plans and math and English are the same across the board between the different schools, and that’s why he thinks the language barrier is the main problem. One question he voiced was whether dual immersion could be integrated for those students. Associate Superintendent of Curriculum & Instruction Duane Sheppard replied that the main problem is that there aren’t enough willing people to sustain it throughout every grade.
“In a perfect world for me, I'd like to see triple languages,” Stoner said. “I'd like to see Spanish, English and sign language. If we could do that, I think we'd be in a whole better world – especially here in Yuma, you need to be bilingual. I don't know how you can make that happen, but I think that that'd be something to do, and if we can make these schools where you could do that immersion to help the Spanish kids learn English and the English kids learn Spanish, I think that as a whole, you'd see the boat rise You would see the grades go up.”
Final Thoughts and Ideas
Although the board tabled the idea to change attendance boundaries for students in the College Acres, Sierra Pacific and El Prado Estates neighborhoods, they may consider doing so for newer subdivisions.
Stoner’s first recommendation was to change attendance boundaries for the neighborhoods between Araby Road to 8 ½ E and 32nd Street to County 13 ½ Street since that area is seeing a lot of growth.
“I gave my recommendation of one neighborhood, but that's not like set in stone, concrete,” he said. “That was an example of this neighborhood is just exploding and [it’s] got, I want to say at least four more subdivisions, five more subdivisions in that section that hasn't even been built out yet that they're still going to do at about 4 or 500 homes per subdivision.”
The idea is a short-term solution to make a long-term one happen.
“You're talking thousands of people that are there that we should be able to move into these inner city schools and fill the voids where we need to so we can go back to the state and say, ‘Okay we're at capacity now,’” he said.
Once all of the schools in the district hit the state's capacity requirements, the district will qualify for state aid. Although the board is aware that the families in those neighborhoods probably won’t like the change needed to reach capacity, Stoner said it’s necessary.
“I really don't think that we can look at who we're going to make mad,” he said. “We're going to make everybody mad. It doesn't matter who we give that letter to; they're not going to like it. But it's something that we all have to agree on that this is something that has to be done. Like it or not, you know, but we have growing pains. Yuma is growing. We don't have the capacity for it, and until we can get the state to kick in or until we can get a bond to pass to build another school, we need to fill the schools that we have with the overgrowth that's over there.”
As the study session wound down, the general consensus was that the board will need to continue carefully analyzing all of its options and that regular updates will need to be provided in their meetings going forward.
“We want to come up with a long term solution that, whether it’s going to impact parents or not, but the long term solution so that we’re not doing small changes along the way,” Ware told KAWC.
The meeting can be listened to in full here.
Reporting for this article is supported by a grant from the Arizona Local News Foundation.
