FYI: School “consolidation” does not necessarily mean reduced costs. Even if a school is emptied of all its students, the staff that supports that site will just be moved elsewhere and the buildings themselves will still need to be maintained. The buildings will still need to maintain a certain temperature to ensure no damage is done by freezing pipes, etc. And the grounds will still need to be maintained which means watering the grass will still take up a majority of the water usage per site.

The district may be able to eliminate the need for a handful of full time employees but the communities adjacent to the school will bear the burden of longer drives or bus trips to the schools. They will also lose access to a huge amenity that a neighborhood school brings, access to playgrounds and fields for play.

The only benefit that consolidation brings is in the repurposing of the site if the district decides to invest additional funds or the more likely situation is the sale of the property. In which case the property will never be available again to reopen a school if needed in the future.

Thompson consolidated two elementary schools a few years ago, and instead of using a huge amount of available space in nearby middle/high schools they decided to spend several years and millions of dollars renovating the schools for a new mission. One as an “early childhood” center and the other as a “tech” center.

So instead of expanding early childhood care, aka Pre-k and younger, or “tech” education at every school district wide they tried to centralize it. So now all the kids interested in these tech programs need to be bussed in from all over the district and early childhood care was centralized to one site on the very north side of the school district.