Cascade looks at options, mulls Verde Vale closure

School districts are leaving no stone unturned in their quest to save money during this tough economy.

According to Interim-Superintendent Harley North of the Cascade Union Elementary School District, he was asked by the board to look at the district partially for reconfiguring the district and partly to save money.

At the Dec. 8 board meeting, North presented the board with his findings on reconfiguration and saving money. One of the items brought to the boards’ attention was the possibility of Verde Vale Elementary School.

“The board of trustees, after considering the continued decline in enrollment and the large disparity in sizes for our K-5 school sites, has come to understand that now is the most opportune time to move to a different model of providing services to all of our grade levels,” said Carr in an editorial for the Valley Post.

Verde Vale has the lowest enrollment of Cascade’s three elementary schools, with just 190 students. In comparison Meadow Lane has 505 students and Anderson Heights has 265.

The board will hold their regular board meeting on January 11 at 4 p.m. in the Anderson Middle School library. On the agenda for that meeting is the reconfiguration of the school district.

According to Carr, at the January meeting the board “will consider vacating Verde Vale Elementary School and reconfiguring the remaining school sites as grade-level focus sites so that students in the primary grades will all be enrolled at one site, intermediate students will be moved to another site and the newly-remodeled middle school will continue to serve the upper grades.”

The hope is that the design will allow for more teacher collaboration at each grade level and will give the district the “advantage of better staffing without resorting to bunching students into combination classes of perhaps 12 first-graders and 15 second-graders at multiple school sites,” stated Carr.

Also on the agenda North added will be a petition for a charter school at the Verde Vale school site.

“One of my recommendations was to close Verde Vale, however, the board will be presented with a petition for a charter school,” said North. “If the board approves the petition, then I will revise my recommendation.”

According to North, the charter petition is for K-8 grades, but for the 2012-2013 school year the charter would open with grades K-3. He added that the district would then keep fourth and fifth grade students at Verde Vale rather than shift them to another school site for the 2012-2013 school year.

North said the district could move fourth and fifth grade student to other school sites in the 2013-2014 school year, but would be dependent on how fast the charter school’s enrollment grew.

North said that all of these plans will only happen if the board approves the petition for the charter school, if they don’t vote for the charter school then his original recommendation of closing Verde Vale will stand.