Editor’s note: Transcript provided by CoverGov.
The Grapevine-Colleyville School District has narrowed its review of elementary campuses for possible closure to two — Dove and Bransford.
The district’s board of trustees has called a special meeting, 6 p.m. Dec. 2 at the Grapevine High School auditorium to review the final recommendations of a committee comprising current and former parents, community members and district employees, and answer questions from the public.
The board also plans to call a second special meeting for 5:30 p.m. Dec. 10 to consider and act on the recommendations.
“The ultimate goal (is) the long-term sustainability of the district for the benefit of its students and of course its staff, in terms of trying to retain high-quality staff,” Paula Barbaroux, GCISD chief operations officer, said Nov. 17 during a board meeting in which she laid out the meeting schedule.
Seventy people signed up to speak during the meeting, which lasted more than four hours.
At the meeting, the board reviewed the factors it said forced the review of campuses for potential closure, and the monthslong process headed by its Education Master Planning Committee.
If the board approves the committee’s recommendations, trustees would move forward as early as January with the creation of a task force and subcommittees to plan the transition, Barbaroux told the board at the Nov. 17 meeting.
The committee’s final recommendations, reached at a public Nov. 12 meeting, included:
- Close Dove and consolidate it with Cannon and Silver Lake elementaries.
- Close Bransford and consolidate it with O.C. Taylor and Colleyville elementaries.
- Sell Heritage Annex, Professional Development & Education Center, Dove, and Early Childhood Development Center and evaluate selling any second campus identified for closure.
- Evaluate the feasibility of several revenue-generating projects.
- Include a deed restriction on all property sales so the new owners can’t compete with the district. This would include no competing schools or child care facilities.
One of the Nov. 17 speakers was Vanessa Steinkamp, an Education Master Planning Committee member.
“The members of the EMPC have my utmost respect,” Steinkamp told the trustees. “We worked together for 11 months and, for the most part, every single member executed their role to the best of their ability given the datasets provided.”
Steinkamp is a former substitute teacher, with children at Bransford and Cannon elementary schools, Colleyville Middle School and Colleyville Heritage High School.
“However,” Steinkamp continued, “I cannot in good conscience stay silent without voicing my objections. The current recommendation to close Bransford does not benefit our students, teachers or community. It is not the best fiscal decision. There were other more lucrative financial options involving less student disruption. Closing Bransford based on the data provided to us could cause overcrowding at both O.C. Taylor and Heritage.”
Several factors figured into the review, all experienced by other districts, district officials said at the Nov. 17 meeting.
In the last 10 years, district enrollment has declined by 1,600 students, including more than 750 at the elementary level. This school year, the district has nearly 2,000 empty seats in its elementary schools. “The (district’s) demographer projects the decline will continue,” the district said.
The state’s basic per-student allotment for the 2025-26 school year grew minimally to $6,215 from $6,160.
Inflation has risen substantially, driving up the district’s costs.
The state Legislature’s approval, with Gov. Greg Abbott’s urging, of vouchers that parents can use to pay for private education threw a further uncertainty into the mix, the district said.
Other trends include the level of competition from private, charter, homeschool hybrid and online schools, Barbaroux said during the meeting.
“Sadly, all of this kind of set the stage” to hasten discussions about potential consolidation, Barbaroux said.
Cost cuts and revenue-generating ideas aren’t enough to close the gap, district officials and trustees said. Cost cuts have included eliminating block schedules at the district’s high schools, realigning middle school schedules, eliminating 146 jobs by attrition, and implementing zero-based budgeting. Revenue generators have included selling more corporate sponsorships and advertising and fundraising.
The master planning committee’s study examined various kinds of impact on students and the district’s finances and operations in narrowing its recommended closures:
- Students displaced, including numbers and whether they would be split among two or more campuses.
- Whether the campuses that take in the displaced students would continue to operate efficiently.
- Commute length for parents.
- Changes to the district’s transportation network.
- Enrollment history.
- Impact on special programs at the campuses.
- Impact on student groups.
- Ability to expand schools in the future, if demographic trends turn more favorable.
- Proximity of campuses to secondary campuses.
- Viability of selling or “repurposing” campuses.
The committee zeroed in on Dove as a recommended closure first, then, finally, Bransford.
This school year, Dove is running at 56.98% of capacity, with 359 enrolled students and 277 available seats.
Bransford is running at 67.3% of capacity, with 424 enrolled students and 205 available seats.
Several factors weighed in favor of closing Bransford, district officials said. Those included:
- Enrolled Bransford students being split between two campuses. Closing O.C. Taylor, by contrast, would require sending students to four campuses, district officials said. Some Colleyville and O.C. Taylor students would also have to move.
- Relatively low number of displaced students at an estimated 587.
- Declining enrollment.
- Ability to consolidate out-of-district Colleyville-area students at Colleyville Elementary.
- Attractiveness of the property to potential buyers, due to its location and abutting businesses off of Grapevine Highway.
- Relatively low impact on parent commute time.
- Feasibility of moving the fine arts program to another campus.
- Ability to relocate the medically fragile unit to another campus.
Factors in favor of closing Dove, the district said:
- Only Dove students would be displaced, split between two campuses.
- The campuses that receive the students would be able to continue to operate efficiently and wouldn’t require changes.
- Declining enrollment.
- No additional bus routes would be needed. Additional parent commute time would be “reasonable.”
- No special programs would be affected.
- The property is in the heart of a residential district and is “conducive” for residential development.
- It’s a smaller campus at 8.92 acres.
To learn more about how the transcript that informed this report was created, visit covergov.com.
Eric Zarate is a freelance journalist. Scott Nishimura is a senior editor at the Fort Worth Report.
If you believe anything in these notes is inaccurate, please email us at news@fortworthreport.org with “Correction Request” in the subject line.
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