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Previously:

• Del Norte Unified Plan Calls For Restructuring In-Town Elementary Schools

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Though they said they were just giving a report, Del Norte County Unified School District administrators resurrected a COVID-era discussion about reconfiguring the Crescent City area’s four elementary schools.

The idea is to restructure Joe Hamilton, Bess Maxwell, Mary Peacock and Pine Grove schools so that half serve transitional kindergarten through second-grade students and the other half serve third- through fifth-graders.

DNUSD Superintendent Jeff Harris told the Board of Trustees on Thursday that he’d like to start the conversation with families, members of the site council, teachers and classified staff at those four schools. He said he wanted to find out what they think the pros and cons of reconfiguring those schools would be.

“Even if we had a windfall of $5 million today for school reconfiguration that drops in our lap, we may still choose not to do it because there may be some things that would prevent it,” Harris told trustees.

District administrators brought the topic up for discussion in June 2021 and had included it in DNUSD’s Local Control Accountability Plan for the 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years. The district had been using federal dollars to keep class sizes low and avoid combination classes, Assistant Superintendent of Business Jeff Napier said Thursday.

At the time, leaders were discussing what would happen when those dollars went away, Napier said. Because of declining enrollment, DNUSD would have had to establish combination classes because “there were too many students for just one class and not enough for two,” he said.

Turning two schools into a TK-2 campus and having third- through fifth-grade at the other two would balance out classes better, teachers would no longer be working in isolation and there was the potential to create a better learning environment, Napier said.

For special education students, teachers would be working with kindergarten through second-grade and third- through fifth-grade students at separate campuses instead of having a single teacher doing a K-5 special education program, Napier said.

During his report, Napier included a grade reconfiguration study DNUSD commissioned from PBK Architects on Feb. 14, 2022. PBK representatives had toured each campus in September 2021, reviewing kindergarten classrooms, play areas, restrooms and other classes and had spoken with the school principals.

According to the study, kindergarten classrooms must meet specific physical design requirements, which include being housed in a 1,350 square foot room that has a restroom, storage and a teacher workroom space. Proximity to a restroom, a drop-off location and a play area factor into those requirements as well, according to the study.

PBK Architect’s study had recommended reconfiguring Bess Maxwell and Mary Peacock schools to house transitional kindergarten through second-grade and Joe Hamilton and Pine Grove to house third- through fifth-grade.

The study also included a total estimate of about $3 million for construction and “soft costs” for modifying all four schools as well as a cost breakdown at each campus.

Napier said it would take about one to two years to get the school sites ready before reconfiguration could be implemented.

“There would definitely be modernizations to the individual classrooms,” he said. “Any classroom that’s made into a kindergarten or TK classroom is going to have to have new plumbing put in, restrooms put in and the re-doing of the inside of the room and such.”

Back in 2021, DNUSD leaders had proposed using $600,000 in federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSR II) dollars to facilitate school reconfiguration. Napier said he had submitted the project to the California Department of Education to see if those funds could be used for school reconstruction and was told no “because it has nothing to do with improving the safety of the school for COVID.”

Though there are benefits to a reconfiguration — Harris said a TK-2 school would focus on the basics of being a student, including learning to read and understand numbers while state testing would start at the 3-5 schools — transportation could be a hurdle for parents.

“If I’m a parent and I have a child in second grade, a child in fourth grade and a child in sixth grade, now you’re talking about three drop offs instead of just two potentially,” Harris said. “So how do we mitigate that for families.”

One possible solution that was brought up in 2021 was having parents drop all of their students off at a single location and then those students would be bussed to their individual school site, Harris said.

Del Norte Teachers Association representative Amber Tiedeken-Cron said she was around when DNUSD had explored school reconfiguration during the recession. Jan Moorehouse was superintendent at the time, she said.

Tiedeken-Cron urged trustees to go back into the archives to find the notes from that discussion so they can “preview the community’s concerns.”

“If you ever want your Board meeting not to be slow, this is the ticket,” she said. “Attitudes may have changed, but you could see what people’s concerns were.”

In addition to asking about costs and how classrooms would need to be modified, Board President Charlaine Mazzei asked why Joe Hamilton was deemed to better for third- through fifth-graders while Bess Maxwell was housing transitional kindergarten through second grade.

Harris said that while the consensus might be that Bess Maxwell would be better for third- through fifth-grade than Joe Hamilton because of its more open layout, Joe Hamilton students would matriculate into Crescent Elk Middle School, which is across the street.

Caralee Hoffman, who teaches sixth grade at Crescent Elk, liked this idea.

“I want to get those fifth-grade kids that are ready for sixth-grade math over in my classroom,” she said. “If they’re just right across the street, then they have more access to what’s going on at Crescent Elk.”

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