DPS has shuttered dozens of schools in recent years citing low enrollment and budget pressure, but parents in affected neighborhoods say closures destroyed community anchors and forced long bus rides on kids. Was this responsible governance or a betrayal of Denver families?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentMy daughter had to start taking a 45-minute bus ride in second grade. SECOND GRADE. She's seven. She gets on the bus before sunrise in January. Tell me again how this was the responsible choice.
Honestly the underenrollment problem was created by DPS itself when they went all-in on the school choice model. You flood a city with charter options, families spread out across dozens of schools, then you turn around and say 'oh wow these neighborhood schools are underenrolled, guess we have to close them.' They manufactured the problem and then used it as justification. Classic.
Born and raised in Cole neighborhood. When they closed my kids' elementary school it wasn't just a school closing — it was like pulling the keystone out of an arch. The whole block changed. Parents stopped knowing each other. The corner store that relied on morning foot traffic closed six months later. You can't put a dollar amount on what a neighborhood school does for social fabric, and DPS absolutely gutted ours.
What kills me is they closed schools in lower-income neighborhoods where parents have the fewest options and the longest distances to travel, while wealthier areas saw less disruption. If this was purely a numbers decision it would have looked a lot more evenly distributed across the city. It didn't, and that tells you something.
Someone in this thread needs to ask: what happened to the buildings? Because I know at least two former DPS properties in my neighborhood that sat empty for years, became magnets for problems, and are now being converted into market-rate condos. If the community NEEDED that space, why weren't community organizations given first right of refusal? That part of the story never gets enough attention.
I moved here from Chicago in 2019 and I'll be honest — I thought Denver would have its act together more than Chicago did on this stuff. Nope. Same playbook. Close the neighborhood schools, push families toward charters, watch the district enrollment drop even more because parents leave the system entirely. It's self-defeating and anyone who's watched this happen in other cities knows exactly where it ends.
A fire station doesn't host kindergarten graduations and food pantries and community meetings and after-school tutoring. The fire station analogy is the laziest take in this entire debate and I am EXHAUSTED by it.
can someone explain to me why they kept closing schools in north Denver and Park Hill but somehow every charter school got to stay open?? like the math is not mathing here
I'm a DPS teacher (not gonna say which school for obvious reasons) and the thing nobody talks about is what this does to staff. When a school closes you don't automatically land somewhere else. I know colleagues who left education entirely after closures. That's institutional knowledge and community relationships just... gone. The disruption isn't only for students.
That's not accurate at all — there is no Colorado state law mandating school closures at a specific enrollment threshold. DPS has discretion on closures and they've exercised it aggressively. Please don't spread misinformation on something this important to families who are still fighting for their communities.
Hard disagree with most of this thread. I taught at a school that was running 38% capacity. We had more administrators than some grade levels had students. The resources per kid were still worse than overcrowded schools because the fixed costs don't scale down. Consolidation done RIGHT can actually help kids. The problem isn't that schools closed, it's HOW they closed — no transition support, no community input, just a letter in March.
i went to Gilpin back in the day. that school meant everything to that community. when i drive past it now and see what it became i genuinely have to look away. some things you just dont get back.
Okay I'll be the one to say it — a lot of these schools were genuinely underperforming academically AND underenrolled. Parents were already voting with their feet. The closures were a symptom of a problem that existed long before DPS made the call. Blaming the closure for destroying the community ignores that the community was already struggling to sustain the school.
Responsible governance. Sorry but sentimentality doesn't balance a budget. If a school is running at 40% capacity you're paying full overhead for half-empty hallways. That money could go to schools that are actually functioning. I know it's hard to hear but DPS made the right call.
Fun fact: DPS enrollment has actually been declining since the 1970s so this isnt some new crisis they invented. The city just has fewer kids than it used to and more school options than ever. At some point you have to right-size the infrastructure. Nobody complains when the city closes a fire station that covers an area with half the calls it used to have.
Actually DPS has been legally required to close any school below 150 students since 2008 under state law, so the board literally had no choice in most of these cases. People are mad at the wrong institution.
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Are dating apps genuinely harder for men or for women?
108 comments
Is judging someone by their height as shallow as judging by their weight?
108 comments