Support Douglass Elementary & BVSD Students

An incomplete plan today means more closures tomorrow

The Resilient Schools proposal doesn't hit the target it was built for. If it passes as-is, another school and another community will be put through exactly what Douglass is facing now.

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The situation at a glance

67%

Douglass's capacity utilization. The district's threshold for review is under 60%

281

Students at Douglass, split three ways under this plan

$10 - 15M

Cost to execute this plan, against $3.5–4M a year in claimed savings

Sept. 22

4 weeks notice of a final board vote for a singular proposal.

On August 25th, the BVSD school board announced a proposal to evict Douglass Elementary School and move High Peaks Elementary into its building. Douglass never triggered a low-enrollment warning and was never part of the cohort in discussions to consolidate or shut-down.

Douglass students, parents, faculty and staff learned of this news that same day with the final vote being held September 22nd, just four weeks later.

Other schools facing closure got years of surveys, outreach, committees and meetings and the Douglass community simply received the news with everyone else and no public comment from the board.

The district's own threshold for closure review is under 60% capacity. Douglass sits at 67% and is ahead of every other school it's being asked to feed into.

Douglass also has a strong open-enrollment population with 37% (103 students) choosing to attend; more than 3 schools the student-body is being asked to feed into combined.

Lastly, an incredible ICAN facility (Intensive Center for Affective Needs) is housed in Douglass Elementary and would be relocated to an older school that isn't purpose-built to assist students with specialized needs.

The position of our parent's is the data simply doesn't support this decision. Douglass doesn't meet the district's own criteria for closure review and the process skipped the steps and considerations other school communities were given.

Our Ask

Remove Douglass from the September 22 vote.

Publicly share the data behind this recommendation and hold dedicated public forums for Douglass families.

Apply the district's own advisory and community-engagement process to Douglass before any decision is made

Publish Douglass's actual boundary lines and the ICAN facility-suitability assessment for Heatherwood.

The four p's

The district's plan skips their own process, doesn't provide the payout, gives priority to one school and breaks promises with our community.

process

Never flagged by the district's own early-warning system

BVSD's Long Range Advisory Committee framework, in place since 2023, triggers a closure review at under 2 classes/grade and under 60% capacity. Douglass, at 67%, never met it and was never designated. The 2024 advisory list, Coal Creek, Community Montessori, Eldorado K-8, Flatirons, Kohl, Mesa, Heatherwood, doesn't include Douglass. Two of those flagged schools would receive Douglass's students while staying open themselves.

Source:
2025 BVSD Capacity Summary

The best-utilized school in its own cluster

Douglass: 67%. Its receiving schools: Coal Creek 55%, Eisenhower 54%, Heatherwood 46%. On the district's own 2030 projections, Eisenhower and Heatherwood remain below Douglass's current utilization even after absorbing its students.

BVSD Resilient Schools proposal, 8/25/26, slide 48.

No engagement, no warning

Heatherwood's designation brought a 2023 survey, a 15-member advisory team, nine public meetings, and a new STEAM program. Douglass got no focus group and was never named in spring engagement. The closure first appeared Aug. 25, at a work session with no public comment, four weeks before the vote.

hee.bvsd.org engagement page; BVSD Aug. 25, 2026 board deck.

Payout

Misses its own target

The district's own deck says Boulder's enrollment sustains 10 elementary schools; this plan leaves about 13. Districtwide utilization moves only from 63.1% to 67.9%. More closures will be needed regardless. This doesn't finish the job, it starts it at the wrong school.

BVSD Resilient Schools proposal, 8/25/26, slides 43, 55.

Savings under 1% of the budget

$3.5 to 4M a year against a roughly $494M budget, after $12.5 to 15M in one-time costs. No net savings for 3 to 4 years. A June 2026 Stanford study of California school closures found districts essentially broke even: staffing gets reassigned rather than cut, and per-pupil funding follows departing families.

BVSD Resilient Schools proposal, slide 60; Pearman, via Education Week, June 2026.

Priority

One planning cycle every 13 years

BVSD asks families to commit to a school zone for thirteen years, but can't justify what this district will look like past a single planning cycle.

We can't ask our youngest kids to absorb that kind of disruption when the district itself won't commit to anything past a few years at a time. If this passes without real answers, families won't stick around for the next round of closures, they'll just leave and take funding with them.

Promise

Douglass gets the thinnest guarantees of any community in this plan

Every other affected school keeps its students together. Douglass alone gets split apart: a one-year, space-limited priority, bus service guaranteed to only one of the schools they land in, a childcare lottery, and no placement certainty until January. That kind of disruption has real, documented costs for kids, and it falls hardest on students like Marshall Fire survivors who've already lived through one displacement.

ICAN gets the worst of it. It's BVSD's most intensive special-education program, it's moved to a single line on the 75-slide deck without a transition plan or assessment.

ICAN, the Intensive Center for Affective Needs, is the district's center-based special-education program.

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