Summit Academy will move to Castro Elementary’s building. Castro parents have concerns.
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DENVER — Castro Elementary School, which has served generations of students in Denver’s Westwood neighborhood, will close at the end of the school year.
The school is named after education and civil rights activist Richard T. Castro. The building will welcome a different cohort of students in August.
Summit Academy is moving into the building this summer with plans to open in time for the 2025-26 school year. The academy is a Denver Public Schools-run “pathways school” for sixth through 12th graders.
DPS pathways schools offer an alternative learning environment for students who are not on track to graduate at other district schools. The pathways schools offer credit recovery programs, more career and technical education courses and smaller class sizes.
Students at Summit Academy currently attend class in a converted office building. The district rents a gym space across the street for students to use because the campus has no athletic facilities.
Summit’s move to the Castro Elementary building will improve the educational experience for its students and provide more opportunities for school activities, said Milo Marquez, chair of the Latino Education Coalition. Ninety-six percent of Summit Academy’s students are Hispanic.
Marquez and other community members — including Virginia Castro, widow of the elementary school’s namesake — advocated for the move in a school board meeting January 23.
“We are finally giving these students a school building where they can thrive,” Marquez said. “We need to get these kids into a real traditional school setting. Whether they have difficulties learning, that shouldn't prevent them from being in a traditional school setting.”
The district announced its decision to move Summit Academy to Castro Elementary’s building February 20. In early March, DPS held a meeting at Castro Elementary to discuss community feedback about the decision.
Parents of students at Castro Elementary, who just went through the SchoolChoice enrollment process to place their children in different schools, told Rocky Mountain PBS they are concerned and confused by the decision to use the Castro Elementary building for another school.
“We left the meeting feeling like, ‘But what about our kids?’” said Gayle Dominguez, who has a son in first grade at Castro Elementary.
“[They] decided to get rid of this school that has higher enrollment than what [Summit] has. The whole argument in the first place [for closure] was that the enrollment numbers are super low.”
At 233 students, Summit Academy’s enrollment is slightly lower than Castro Elementary’s enrollment of 241 students.
The way the district calculates building capacity is different for elementary schools and secondary schools, particularly pathways schools, said Andrew Huber, executive director of enrollment and campus planning at DPS.
Summit Academy has smaller class sizes, so classrooms will be considered full with fewer students. It will use more space for its technical courses and social emotional learning programs, Huber said.
“Castro was using 37% of their capacity of 625 over the course of this year, and Summit Academy, based on their current enrollment, would use over 60% of a much lower rated capacity of 373,” Huber said.
Families impacted by the Castro Elementary closure filled out a survey to vote on how they would like the building to be used.
Dominguez wanted the building to be used as an early childhood education center or another resource that the former Castro students could use, since they’re already familiar with the building and the surrounding neighborhood.
Most families voted for an ECE center or a community resource center. The option for “use by charter, private, or non-DPS schools” received 12% of the vote.
Summit Academy is not a charter school. Charter schools are still public, but they have a separate school board that has a contract with the DPS Board of Education. This contract outlines performance goals and state and federal requirements, like non-discrimination laws and standardized testing.
State law forbids DPS from closing charter schools due to low enrollment. Charter schools can choose to close due to low enrollment, but it’s not the district’s decision.
It’s not uncommon for a charter school to move into a building left vacant by a closed school. State law requires districts to publish a list of their surplus buildings.
Until this school year, the charter middle school Rocky Mountain Prep Sunnyside operated out of the former Remington Elementary School building. In Jefferson County, the charter school Doral Academy of Colorado moved into the former Zerger Elementary School building in 2017 until moving again in 2023.
Compass Academy, a charter school sharing space with Abraham Lincoln High School, requested to move into the Castro Elementary building. The DPS board denied its request.
When a new charter school moves into a neighborhood, the schools pull students from the district-run schools in the area and lowers the enrollment of those schools. When the district looks to close low-enrollment schools, the charter school is not an option.
As a district-run school, Summit Academy would not be exempt from enrollment-based closure, if the district faced that decision in the future.
Castro parents are still worried about another school moving into the area, which has no shortage of campuses.
“There's the high school and the middle school that are down the street already,” Dominguez said. “I feel like they keep wanting to put more schools in the same vicinity, which they're going to end up having to keep closing more schools because they keep putting them there.”
Maria Rodriguez and her six children all went to Castro Elementary. Two of her children — her kindergartener and fifth grader — still attend. She lives a few blocks away from the school.
Castro Elementary is the heart of the neighborhood, Rodriguez said. The building is across the street from the Boys and Girls Club, making it easy for children to walk to after-school care.
The school is also a few blocks away from Westwood Homes, an affordable housing development. Rodriguez worries about families who live in the development — and in other parts of her neighborhood — who rely on the convenience of walking to school.
DPS provides transportation to elementary schoolers who live more than one mile from school and to middle and high schoolers who live more than 2.5 miles away. Rodriguez said that distance is still far for small children, especially in cold weather.
“I think this is more of a decision that was made by the district and not meeting the community's needs. I feel like the community's input was not taken into consideration,” said Rodriguez.
She’s also worried that the playground on Castro’s campus will be removed after the building transitions to serve older students. Rodriguez said the fenced-in playground is full of families during the summers.
Huber said the playground will not be removed from the campus and will still be accessible to the community.
The district will need to make changes to the campus to make it suitable for older students. It will move Summit Academy’s furniture to the building, update the signage, install more security cameras and purchase more furniture, which will cost about $250,000.
DPS will eventually spend about $750,000 from its 2024 bond to add science labs to the building.
“I think the goal here is not to make money. It's to better serve kids,” Huber said.
Dominguez’s son will go to second grade at Munroe Elementary School next year. When DPS announced Castro Elementary’s closure in November, he struggled with the news. Now, he’s comforted knowing a few of his friends will go to Munroe too.
But Dominguez predicts a lot of difficult goodbyes June 3, the last day of school.
“Once it comes time for everything to close and for it to just be done and for us to start another adventure, I think then he'll be more upset over it. It'll be a bigger understanding [that] this is final,” Dominguez said.
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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