As Castro Elementary prepares to close, a community searches for answers
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DENVER — As soon as Gayle Dominguez stepped foot in Castro Elementary School, she knew it was where she’d send her son to kindergarten. When principal Gilberto Munoz and parent liaison Eve Ulloa greeted her at the door, she felt like they were welcoming her to their home, not their workplace.
Her son, now a first-grader, thrived at Castro Elementary. A naturally-anxious child, he’s become more outgoing and social since starting school. Dominguez attributes that to the teachers and staff who helped him navigate the transition of starting school.
Dominguez lives in Lakewood, which is outside of the Denver Public School district. The 30-minute commute — sometimes an hour, if the weather is bad — is worth it to send her son to this supportive, welcoming school in Westwood, just two blocks from where her sister lives.
Now, Dominguez and 200 other Castro families must navigate another difficult transition. Castro Elementary is one of seven schools that the DPS school board voted unanimously to close at the end of this school year. Three others will be partially closed or restructured.
“I know for sure there are so many good schools out there, but I know that we won't find another school with the community that we have now and the teachers and staff that we have now,” Dominguez said. “That's really heartbreaking because this is someplace that I 100% trust with my child.”
“My biggest fear is knowing that he is going to go back to being scared and not wanting to be in a completely new place with people that he doesn't know. I don't know how that's going to affect him, and I don't know how that's going to affect me.”
Low enrollment in a relatively young neighborhood
On November 7, superintendent Alex Marrero recommended 10 schools for closure or partial closure. The recommendation was based on low enrollment, not student performance.
Schools receive funding on a per-student basis, so fewer students means less money to keep that school running.
Castro Elementary serves 244 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. With this number of students, just 39% of the building is being used, according to DPS.
According to DPS, elementary school enrollment in the southwest region has declined, and they expect that trend to continue. Castro Elementary is “centrally located in a region heavily impacted by declining enrollment, surrounded by low utilization rate schools,” per DPS’ website.
Castro Elementary is located in Westwood, one of the youngest neighborhoods in Denver. About 20% of Westwood’s population is 9-years-old or younger. In comparison, approximately 10% of Denver’s population is in that age range.
DPS has seen an overall decline in enrollment since 2019, with a slight increase in enrollment the last two school years. There are 85,313 students enrolled in the district this year, according to preliminary counts from DPS. In the next five years, DPS predicts about an 8% decline in enrollment due to decreasing birth rates in Denver.
Ten years ago, Castro Elementary served 615 students, more than twice the number of students attending now.
DPS reports birth rates are declining most rapidly in the southwest region, which includes Westwood. While that explains concerns about future drops in elementary school enrollment, it doesn’t explain why so many schools in that region are currently underutilized given the high density of school-aged children in the neighborhood.
An oversaturation of schools in the area could be one explanation. There are 15 elementary schools within just two miles of Castro Elementary. Three of them charter schools. Enrollment at each individual school is low when the student population is spread across so many campuses.
Rob Gould, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association union that represents DPS teachers, including those at Castro, attributes this high density of schools with the rapid expansion of charter schools in the district in the last two decades.
In 2015 alone, the DPS school board approved 12 new charter schools and two district-run schools. Charter schools have a contract with the DPS Board of Education and need to meet certain performance and program standards, but they are independently operated and have more flexibility with curriculum than district-run schools.
State law doesn’t give school districts permission to close charter schools based on low enrollment. Charter school closures by districts must be based on performance. (Charter schools can choose to close on their own for low enrollment, but it can’t be district-mandated.)
This means that when the district considers school closures based on the number of students attending, district-run schools are the ones on the chopping block.
“You have a situation where you have declining enrollment and you have way too many schools open to begin with, then you have to make choices on which schools to keep open and keep closed,” Gould said.
“These schools like Castro that have been there for quite some time, a school district can't go in and close the charter school that has the same number of kids down the street, but they can close the [district-run] school.”
Student body not representative of the neighborhood
Gentrification is a concern in Westwood. The area’s relatively low home prices — the median home price is almost 40% less than that of Denver County — attract people from outside the community, and this demand then drives up housing costs for longtime residents, many of whom rent their homes.
From 2017 to 2022, housing prices nearly doubled in Westwood, according to 2022 American Community Survey data.
“Many of the families that used to live out there, they can't afford to live up there, and so they've moved to more affordable housing, like in northeast Denver, the far northeast or surrounding areas,” Gould said.
Northeast Denver is one area where DPS predicts increased enrollment. Part of the $975 million bond that Denver voters approved for the district will fund the construction of a new elementary school in Green Valley Ranch.
While DPS draws neighborhood zones to assign students to schools near them, parents can apply to send their children to any school within the district.
As families who can no longer afford to live in the neighborhood move away, the families moving in aren’t necessarily sending their children to nearby schools. Less than a third of elementary-aged students in Castro’s neighborhood zone choose to go to Castro.
Families living in Westwood don’t make up the majority of the Castro community. More than half — about 56% — of Castro’s student population comes from outside the neighborhood boundary.
Westwood’s population is about 77% Hispanic and 13% white and is gradually becoming more white. This ratio is not represented in Castro’s school population, which is consistently around 85% Hispanic and less than 5% white.
Hispanic students and students who qualify for free or reduced lunches are more likely to attend underutilized schools, DPS reported. This means these students are more likely to experience the upheaval of school closures.
Dominguez said she was excited to send her youngest son to Castro Elementary when he was old enough to go to kindergarten. The teachers there had already begun learning his name and greeting him when he accompanied his mom to drop off and pick up his older brother.
“The people that work inside of Castro are what make the entire school how it is,” Dominguez said. “It's a whole entire family for these kids away from their families.”
Community comment and concerns
Dominguez feels like the closure decision happened very quickly. Within two weeks of the superintendent announcing his recommendation, the school board voted to approve the closures.
This timeline is condensed compared to previous school closures, Gould said. Two years ago, the superintendent initially recommended 10 schools for closure, eventually whittling it down to five and then two schools after listening to the community response. That recommendation was rejected by the board.
“[Two years ago] it was about a semester-long debate on all of this, and so there was a lot more time for parents to connect,” Gould said. “I think that's probably one of the reasons why they didn't close as many schools last time.”
In the weeks leading up to the board’s vote last month, DPS held public comment sessions at the affected schools, first with members of the board and then with the superintendent.
Dominguez attended and spoke at several meetings with the board at Castro Elementary, as well as the general meeting at the Emily Griffith Campus, which welcomed members from all affected schools to speak.
She protested outside her son’s school to make other parents aware of the potential closure. She said it seemed like many Spanish-speaking parents were not aware that Castro was even on the list.
The following week, Dominguez attended the evening meeting at Castro Elementary to listen to the superintendent explain his reasoning behind the recommendation and, once again, express her concerns.
DPS told parents that Castro Elementary students who aren’t transitioning to middle school are guaranteed a spot at Knapp Elementary or Charles M. Schenck Community School, or CMS, located in or near Westwood. Knapp Elementary has a TNLI program (or Transitional Native Language Instruction) and CMS is a dual-language campus.
If students don’t want to attend either of those schools, they will have the highest priority among students applying to schools outside of their assigned zone.
Dominguez doesn’t understand how the district will guarantee first pick for the more than a thousand students whose schools just closed. She doesn’t think the district should assume that most of the parents will choose to send their children to Knapp Elementary or CMS.
The board’s decision came out right before the district’s week-long Thanksgiving break, and the first round of SchoolChoice applications opens January 15 and closes on February 18.
With the district’s winter holiday break coming up, Dominguez feels like she has a limited time to tour schools and make a decision about where to send her son. In contrast, she said she had a year to make a decision about where to send her son for kindergarten.
At the public comment meeting, superintendent Marrero said the decision to close the schools now will prevent a situation where the district needs to close the schools in the middle of the school year and avoid an even more disruptive change for the community.
“I understand that, but they have the numbers all the time. If they knew that these schools were low or declining enrollment, why couldn't they have done something to fix this problem before it got to this point where they had to close the school?” Dominguez said.
“It's hard to have trust in DPS now because I don't know what schools are going to be next on the chopping block.”
Four of the schools that will be closed — Columbian Elementary, Schmitt Elementary, Palmer Elementary and International Academy of Denver at Harrington — were on the superintendent’s list of 10 schools recommended for closure in 2022.
Given the swiftness of the decision, Dominguez thinks the public comment meetings were a formality.
“I feel like they had already made the decision to close them because of the way that they were talking to us like the schools were already closing,” Dominguez said.
“I think they were just doing the community a favor to let them speak and let us put all this hard work into fighting and putting groups together for really nothing. I think they knew that they would be voting to close them, period.”
In her message to the community about the closure decision, board president Carrie Olson said the board deeply engaged with the community’s input when making its decision.
She said the board was “moved by what [they] learned from the meetings, phone calls, public comments, and personal stories from all of our DPS community.”
The low enrollment numbers spoke louder than the anecdotes of students, parents and teachers. As long as the district’s funding comes on a per-student basis, the resources available to a school will continue to be proportional to the number of students it serves.
The impact on teachers, and the impact of teachers
While affected students are guaranteed placement at schools within their neighborhood zone, the same does not apply to educators.
Teachers at affected schools will need to apply for open positions at other schools for the upcoming school year.
Teachers who receive high enough effectiveness ratings for three consecutive years are granted non-probationary status, which means the district must place them at a school for one year if they don’t find a position on their own. After that, they’re on their own. Probationary teachers are not guaranteed a job next year.
A few positions, like math, special education and ELA-S teachers, will be placed at another district school next year if they don’t find a job, regardless of probationary status.
The DPS bond that Denver voters approved last month cannot be used to fund teachers’ salaries. Bonds can only be used for one-time expenses, such as constructing a new school or fixing existing buildings’ air conditioning.
There’s a natural turnover of parents and students at schools as children move from elementary to middle to high school. Reducing the turnover of educators at a school creates consistency for the community.
“They know the ins and outs of the community,” Gould said. “For example, [at] Castro, they often will know families for generations. They know how to support these families and they have the relationships built already.”
Learning to say goodbye
DPS is offering mental health support for students, families and staff who are impacted by the closures. This includes on-campus psychologists to help students deal with the transition.
Dominguez is frustrated that this upheaval is something her six-year-old son has to deal with in the first place. Since her son found out that his school was on the list to be closed, he’s been more panicked and prone to crying, she said.
The situation has been emotionally draining for Dominguez too. For now, she’ll turn her attention to deciding which school to send her son to next year and cherishing the time they have left with the community at Castro.
“It was such a mentally exhausting experience,” Dominguez said. “We did do everything as parents that I think we were able to do, and we still lost the fight. That's the hard part is going to my son like, yes, Mommy's been fighting for you and a lot of other parents have been fighting for the school to stay open, but in the end it wasn't good enough and we still lost it.”
“So it’s a good lesson for all of us, but it's also a really hard lesson for all of us to learn too.”