Dive Brief:
- Poudre School District’s Board of Education last week approved the closure or consolidation of eight schools between the 2027-28 and 2028-29 school years.
- The approved plan in the Fort Collins, Colorado, school district comes as it projects average enrollment to be 23,566 students from 2025 to 2030 — leaving over 10,500 seats open. The district has the capacity to serve 34,105 students.
- Poudre announced a proposal to close nine schools and consolidate two others in late September. The plan approved by the board on Oct. 27 would close six schools instead, in addition to the original plan’s consolidation of two schools.
Dive Insight:
Poudre’s enrollment declines reflect a larger trend in both Colorado and across the nation, which is also causing many other districts to close schools.
The enrollment challenges in Poudre largely stem from declining birthrates, higher cost of living and fewer young families moving into the area, according to the district. Poudre said in a September presentation that it expects enrollment to fall by 2% annually for the next five years. For every 2% drop in enrollment, the district loses $6 million in revenue.
For years, Poudre has faced enrollment declines that the district has tried to offset by consolidating staff, cutting millions of dollars from its budget, and eliminating hundreds of positions, said Superintendent Brian Kingsley in a September press conference announcing the initial school closure and consolidation proposal.
“Every year that we have protected buildings, we have done it by asking teachers and staff to do more with less,” Kingsley said. “That is not a sustainable way to support the people who teach our students, and it is not producing the experience for all of our students that each of them deserve at every single school. We can be better than that.”
By the 2027-28 school year, Poudre will close three elementary schools and one middle school. In that same period, the district will also consolidate a high school and an alternative education campus into one new school at a location still to be determined. The district will also close a dual language elementary school in 2028-29, but it plans to develop a "more unified" dual language program that will open that same school year.
Another elementary school was approved for closure in 2028-29, unless the Town of Timnath — a local community within Poudre’s district boundaries — secures full funding to cover the costs of building a new elementary school.
Meanwhile, three other elementary schools that were originally recommended for closure were not approved by the board and will remain open. Those three historic schools are located in rural mountainous areas of the district, and their proposed closure received pushback from local community members.
District parents urged the board to continue operating the three mountain elementary schools, noting that closures would force students to commute over 70 miles roundtrip and likely push those families to consider enrolling their children in charter schools, private schools, or homeschooling.
“Our three campuses function as a single, highly efficient school spread across a vast geographic region, sharing staff, specialized teachers, and administrative oversight to deliver some of the highest academic test scores in the district,” a local parent advocacy website said. “Closing any of these campuses doesn’t just shuffle students down the street — it fundamentally disrupts rural life and puts our children at risk.”
Earlier in October, the Board of Education at Adams 12 Five Star Schools in the Denver area approved to close six of its schools in the 2027-28 school year. The decision came as the district reported losing 6,400 students over the last decade and that enrollment decreased faster than initially projected during that period.
Adams 12 also pointed to sharp enrollment declines in Colorado generally, which the district said appears to be dropping faster than many other states. For example, the state’s enrollment reached its lowest point in a decade during the 2025-26 school year — at 870,793 students, according to the Colorado Department of Education.
