New Choice Process Could Lead to Renewed Sac Closure Arguments
/New SPS procedures governing the school choice process mean that Sac’s student enrollment could potentially drop next year. Under enrollment was a main factor cited in last fall’s attempt to close Sac, though it was a false claim: Sac is fully enrolled, by SPS’s own standards [1]!
A drop in enrollment next fall could be weaponized by school board members who still want to close schools, reviving the specter of under enrollment—whether real or imagined—for use in targeting Sacajawea for closure once again.
In this article:
The Facts: What's Changing?
Sacajawea is a neighborhood school, where students are assigned based on where they live. Families can apply to send their student to attend a different school through the Open Enrollment for School Choice process.
SPS is changing two aspects of open enrollment next year: the timelines, and how they make choice assignments.
First, the open enrollment application deadline is moving one month earlier in the year, to Jan 31. This allows SPS to notify families of their choice decision by the end of February, before the commitment deadlines pass for most local private schools. This is a sensible and welcome change!
Second, SPS’s decision-making is also changing. The district plans to fill buildings more fully (up to 85% of operational capacity). They expect this decision to allow more students to receive their choice assignment compared with today.
More critically for Sacajawea, as Assistant Superintendent of Operations Marni Campbell explained at Wednesday’s board meeting, the district decision-making process will no longer protect enrollment at neighborhood schools.
Campbell said that there will certainly be schools that experience significant drops in enrollment as a result of this change. “We’ve already modeled it out,” she said, “and some schools are really going to feel this….We can anticipate which schools will be impacted based on historical choice patterns.”
Data indicates that Sacajawea is almost certainly one of the schools that will lose students under the new process. Historically, more than half of Sac-zoned students opt to attend other SPS schools (more details below). Campbell assured the board that impacted schools would not be allowed to “die on the vine,” but she didn’t explain how these schools would be supported.
Without a concrete support plan in place and having heard Campbell herself promote the false under-enrollment narrative in our own cafeteria during last year’s attempted closures, it’s not unreasonable to anticipate that enrollment drops caused by this policy could be used in the future as a justification to finally close Sac.
The Prediction: Why Sac Is Likely to See a Drop in Enrollment Next Year
Of the 58 elementary schools in SPS, Sacajawea has the second-highest percentage of families who leave via the choice program. Only Green Lake elementary loses more of its locally zoned students to other SPS buildings.
SPS 2024-25 enrollment report showing where SAc students come from, and where Sac-zoned students attend school.
According to SPS’s 2024-25 enrollment report, out of all of the SPS students zoned for Sacajawea, only 44% attended Sac. By comparison, district wide, 71% of students enroll in their attendance-area school.
Nearly a full third (32%) of students zoned for Sac instead attended Hazel Wolf elementary in 2024-25. Sacajawea-zoned students comprise 25% of Hazel Wolf’s K-5 student body!
We see that Sac’s attendance zone has a disproportionately large set of families who prefer to study elsewhere. This fact, combined with SPS increasing the number of students who are admitted to their choice school, and removing protections for neighborhood school enrollment, puts Sac at significant risk for increased flight.
Why Are Families Avoiding Sac?
If SPS has done an analysis on why families leave Sac at such high rates, I haven’t seen it. As a longtime Sac parent, I have my own thoughts that integrate comments and concerns I’ve heard from in our community. As I see it, there are at least four themes driving enrollment away from Sacajawea:
Sacajawea’s facilities are beyond dilapidated, and have been for over a decade. Major and minor repairs have been put off for years, in anticipation of a rebuild. In the 2023-24 school year, there were multiple roof leaks that persisted for months, requiring trash cans in the main corridor to catch the leaking water.
The 2016 opening of Hazel Wolf K-8, only one mile away from Sacajawea. Hazel Wolf is actually closer to home than Sac is, for many Sac-zoned students. Even John Rogers Elementary, into which SPS tried to consolidate the Sacajawea population in 2024, is farther away from Sac (1.23 miles) than Hazel Wolf is. John Rogers is also farther from the homes where Sac-zoned families live (see the SPS zoning map, copied below). It’s no wonder that families have so often chosen shiny new Hazel Wolf, so close to home!
The BEX V levy passed by voters in 2019, which signalled a commitment to a potentially disruptive Sacajawea rebuild. This levy set aside finances for the design of a Sacajawea rebuild. From this time on, the community has consistently anticipated a near-future two-year closure period for a rebuild. Anecdotally, some families have chosen to avoid such a disruption by moving their kids to a place where they could spend their remaining elementary years in a single, stable environment.
The 2024 targeting of Sac for closure created ongoing community concern about the possibility of ongoing closure threats. Questions and anxieties about upcoming closure are regular on the school community’s Facebook page (private), especially from parents of rising kindergarteners. As a parent member of Sac’s BLT team, I am asked semi-regularly on the playground for updates about whether we’re getting rebuilt or closed. Nobody knows what’s happening, and the uncertainty is destabilizing.
SPS attendance area map for 2025-26 (circle annotations mine). note how most of the area of sacajawea’s attendance zone is actually closer to hazel wolf k-8.
The Risk: A Sac Enrollment Drop Could Be Used to Reinvigorate Closure Arguments
I am concerned that a drop in enrollment will lead to renewed calls for Sacajawea’s closure. I am concerned because:
Although closures are temporarily off the table during this time of leadership transition, the board has not eliminated the possibility of near- or mid-term closure plans. Some board members even continue to push for closures.
Last year’s attempted closure was pushed forward via a (false) narrative of under enrollment. Both Assistant Superintendent of Operations Marni Campbell and Director of Enrollment Planning Faauu Manu cited this heavily in the meeting at our school, despite their own data at the time showing that it was not true—in fact, Sacajawea operates at 90% of our building’s estimated capacity [1]. With the district having so eagerly pushed for closure based on a false under-enrollment narrative, I worry that a year with a real enrollment dip will be seized upon as justification for renewed closure attempts.
The conditions that lead to families opting out of Sac are not inevitable. These conditions have been created by district policies. These policies and conditions can be changed.
Leaving our school to crumble into disrepair, unmaintained over 70 years, and then calling it unfit to house students is a policy choice. This is not a natural disaster that could not be foreseen. It’s a man-made disaster that the district has allowed to happen.
Building two new schools—Hazel Wolf and John Rogers—in close proximity to Sac without any planning for how to accommodate the downstream effects of those constructions is, again, a policy choice. The district might have included forward-looking rezoning plans that update school boundaries and factor new constructions into account. It might have engaged with school communities to develop multi-year consolidation plans that support community needs and relationships through a shift. It did none of these things, and that is why Sac is in the state of undesirability that it is today. It didn’t have to be this way.
What Does This Mean for Sac?
If somehow it’s not clear by now, I fear that the new changes to the school choice process will cause a dip in Sac enrollment that reinvigorates a push for Sac’s closure. I hope I’m wrong.
If we face a renewed closure fight in the coming years, I want our community to understand that the decline of Sac—both its physical structures and its relative desirability—has been a calculated, policy-driven phenomenon. A crumbling school with an uncertain future was not inevitable!
Here’s the good news: Outcomes that are not inevitable can be changed. When I see opportunities for us to influence Sac’s future, I’ll share them here. This might look like public testimony at a board meeting, or meeting with district staff. For the moment, it might simply look like educating others in the Sac community about how to address pressures and risks that Sac faces.
On the topic of enrollment specifically, the next interesting moment will come in late February. This is when the district publishes its enrollment projections for the following year, in the “Purple Book” (here is last year’s).
February’s 2026-27 enrollment projections will tell us what impact the district thinks the new choice policies will have on Sac’s enrollment.
From there, we’ll get a better sense of the scope of a potential problem. Maybe that problem takes the form of closure arguments down the line. Maybe that problem simply looks like staffing numbers so small that even our split-classroom staffing solutions no longer work. Maybe I’ll be wrong—maybe Hazel Wolf’s K-5 classrooms are already full, and I will get to delightedly report back here that Sac enrollment is unchanged.
Stick with me through February and we’ll find out together!
[1] Sacajawea is not under enrolled! According to SPS’s 2021 Facilities Master Plan Update (the latest available), Sacajawea is operating at 80% of our operational capacity, and at 90% of our right-sized capacity. Operational capacity is used for short-term planning, and it includes portables in its assessment of usable space. Right-sized capacity is used for long-term planning and does not include portables. The SPS policy goal guiding open enrollment assignments this year states that schools should operate at 85% of their operational capacity.
Sac’s student population has remained largely stable since 2021: we had 198 students then, and we have 199 as of December 1 of this year.