Board President Kevin Walsh opened a Dec. 2 study session of the Kyrene Elementary District by reminding the public that the board would not vote that night on the district’s proposed school closures and attendance‑boundary changes. “There’s no vote that’s happening tonight,” Walsh said, adding the earliest vote would be the board’s Dec. 16 meeting.

District leaders framed consolidation as a response to long‑term enrollment decline and the resulting loss of state funding. A financial presentation from district staff showed projected five‑year losses of roughly 1,100 students under current trends and converted those projections into dollars and average daily membership. The presenter said closing the eight schools proposed by the long‑range planning committee would, under the district’s modeling, address the projected budget gap but cautioned the results depend heavily on assumptions about families’ future enrollment choices.

Educators who work in smaller campuses described how low enrollment can limit electives, specialist time and consistent assistant‑principal coverage. “When you’re a smaller school…we get what’s left over from the full course load,” Holl y Cook, an academic interventionist at Estrella, testified, describing constrained schedules and the difficulty of balancing English‑language development with reading intervention.

Board members spent much of the evening weighing tradeoffs between financial stability and risks tied to announcing closures. Several board members said doing nothing could undermine the student experience; others warned that closing too many schools at once could trigger larger, hard‑to‑predict enrollment losses. “Closing the eight schools that are currently proposed would address the anticipated budget gap for the next five years,” Walsh said, but the board and staff repeatedly noted that community reactions could increase student departures beyond modeled estimates.

After discussion the board directed the superintendent and demographer to return with three publicly releasable map scenarios for the Dec. 16 meeting: the current proposal (six elementary and two middle schools slated for closure), a model that would close five elementary schools and keep both middle schools open, and a model that would close four elementary schools and both middle schools. The board also directed staff to apply objective, measurable criteria when selecting which elementary schools would be removed from the closure list.

Staff proposed a ranked set of objective criteria to be used in those models: (1) number and percent of students from each school’s home boundary who are served on site; (2) home‑boundary utilization of the school; and (3) overall enrollment as a tiebreaker, with transportation and cohort continuity considered in operational modeling. The board asked that the results of the criteria‑based ranking and the demographer’s rebounding maps be shared publicly in advance of next week’s review.

Public comment was strongly against large‑scale closures. Speakers warned that announcing closures often precipitates enrollment losses, citing other Arizona districts where attrition exceeded demographer estimates. Several parents and educators urged the board to protect specialty programming — especially the Kyrene Traditional Academy (KTA) traditional model — and to avoid fragmenting cohorts. In response, staff confirmed KTA will be treated operationally as an elementary for the modeling and said they would explore ways to keep KTA’s K–5 cohort together where feasible.

No formal votes were taken on consolidation at the study session. The board did record unanimous 5–0 approvals of the regular meeting agenda and the consent agenda during the later regular meeting. District staff will return in public session next week with the requested maps and the numeric outputs of the board’s agreed criteria so the board can consider a formal action on Dec. 16.

What’s next: the superintendent and demographer will present the three map scenarios and the district’s application of the board’s objective criteria at a public study session before the Dec. 16 vote. The board asked for those materials to be available in advance to allow community review and comment.