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The Jeffco school district is considering closing a school that serves grades 7-12 and turning it into a specialized high school where students would study for particular career paths.
The draft plan for Jefferson Jr./Sr. High School in Edgewater was discussed by the Jeffco school board on Wednesday after it was first presented to the community last month.
The district isn’t calling the proposed changes a school closure. Rather, it’s calling it a transition, even though the building would likely not serve any students for at least a year and could serve fewer grades when it reopens. Unlike in the past, district leaders say they have time to work on the plan and want the community’s input. No final decision has been made.
“If we find that there’s support for this plan, that we can build something with community that there’s genuine excitement about and momentum for,” then the district might present a final recommendation to the board in June or August, said Claire Takhar, Jeffco’s executive director of strategic initiatives. A closure wouldn’t happen until the 2026-27 school year.
The draft plan is the result of a school boundary study the district commissioned last year that looked at the long-term viability of the district’s current school feeder patterns. The study found that the Jefferson articulation area served the fewest students in the district and was expected to continue to see enrollment declines. If enrollment this fall showed evidence that the estimates were on track, the district needed to come up with a plan, district leaders said.
Right now, Jefferson Jr./Sr. High is serving 629 students, slightly up from last year’s official count of 594 students. A little more than 78% of the school’s students qualify for subsidized meals, a measure of poverty.
The district’s boundary study made a few short-term recommendations for boundary changes in the district, and some long-term recommendations that could result in more school consolidations in the future.
For now, Jeffco leaders said they are not considering changes to any other schools.
Compared to the other short-term recommendations, the boundary study didn’t suggest a particular change to the Jefferson articulation area, but did conclude that the boundary was unsustainable due to expected declining enrollment. The study estimated that by the 2027-28 school year, Jefferson Jr./Sr. High would only serve approximately 372 students.
The district has since adjusted those numbers and on Wednesday told the school board that it expects the school to serve 447 students in four years, still well below the school’s capacity.
The study also looked at the possibility of rearranging school boundaries to even out enrollment. But it found that because of school choice, which allows so many students to pick a school outside their neighborhood, boundary changes have little effect on balancing enrollment.
In the 2023-24 school year, the study found 40% of all Jeffco students were choosing a school outside their designated boundary.
In the boundary of Jefferson Jr./Sr. High, the district found that 47% of families are choosing other middle or high schools.
“Simply moving boundary lines without closing a school and eliminating that option is unlikely to force a change in enrollment behavior of our families,” the report stated.
“We’re looking at an unfortunate victim of the privilege of choice for families,” said Jeffco board member Erin Kane. “My concern in particular is we’re seeing another Title I school essentially being abandoned due to community choice. It’s a really hard reality.”
District staff pointed out that demographics also play a large role in the neighborhood’s enrollment decline.
“Edgewater itself as a city is changing really rapidly,” said Lisa Relou, the district’s chief of staff. “Gentrification is happening at a rapid pace.”
Relou also pointed out that just on the other side of Edgewater, the Denver school district had recommended closing nearby Colfax Elementary for low enrollment. That school has been spared for now.
The study also found that the district is serving about 91% of the children in the county, meaning that enrollment declines can’t just be attributed to students choosing options outside of the district such as private schools or homeschooling.
Even creating specialized programming “does not necessarily draw in new families to Jeffco; instead, these programs simply encouraged more movement within the district itself,” the study stated.
Still, on Wednesday, district staff talked about doing just that with Jefferson Jr./Sr. High. The draft plan from the district would close the school for the 2026-27 school year, and potentially reopen it a year later as a new option school for high school students.
The plan also would move sixth grade students out of elementary schools in the area so that by 2026-27, Lumberg and Edgewater elementary schools would only serve preschool through fifth grade. For secondary grades, the neighborhood would merge with the Wheat Ridge articulation area, so students would feed into Everitt Middle School and then into Wheat Ridge High School.
Over the next couple of months, the district is planning to host “co-design sessions” with the community to explore the plan in more detail, with a focus on what kind of school Jefferson Jr./Sr. High would turn into.
Two initial options include a focus on career education, but one would allow students to attend the newly designed school part-time, similar to the district’s Warren Tech model. The second option would be a full-time career-focused school.
One board member characterized the proposal as “ambiguous.”
Member Danielle Varda said “it sounds a lot like closing a school, consolidating and figuring out what to do with the building, just said in different ways. I think people might feel the same way.”
Superintendent Tracy Dorland said that because the district is allowing the community to help it plan, leaders don’t yet have answers to all the questions being posed by families and community members.
“I feel like there hasn’t been an experience, especially in this community, but I think in many of our communities, where district leadership is sitting down at the table saying, ‘Let’s talk about this, we don’t have all the answers,’ and people actually believing us, and understanding that the other side of the coin of the district not having all the answers is ambiguity and a need from district leadership for people to bring solutions and ideas,” Dorland said. “It’s really uncharted territory.”
The Jeffco school district, which this year is serving 75,495 students, the second largest district in the state, has already closed 21 schools since 2021 due to large drops in enrollment.
At the time of those school closures, the district committed to not closing any high schools and issued a moratorium on such closures, but that moratorium has ended.
According to the boundary study, Jeffco still has 18 schools that are under 60% capacity. The study projected that number to grow to 28 schools by 2027-28. At the same time, seven schools are over 100% capacity. In 2027-28, the study projected six schools to be over capacity.
District leaders said that while the decision to close or transition Jefferson Jr./Sr. High hasn’t been made, the fear is that if the school’s enrollment problem isn’t addressed, in a few years, the district will have to close it when enrollment becomes unsustainable.
The first community co-design meeting is scheduled for Feb. 11.
Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.
