David Willms took drastic measures to enroll his daughter in Jessup Elementary School. Knowing that enrollment was competitive due to crowding, the Cheyenne attorney and father of three arrived outside of the school at around 2 a.m. the night before to get a spot at the front of the line.
“And I was not the first person there,” he said. “I was the third person in line.”
Willms went to such lengths because he had attended Jessup as a child. It is a great school in a tight-knit neighborhood, he said, and it set him up for success. In fact, he and his wife moved into the neighborhood intentionally, he said.
“It’s where we wanted our kids to go, and we were willing to do anything to make sure they went there,” he said.
Fast-forward 12 years, and his three children have attended Jessup; his youngest is in first grade there. They’ve been able to walk or bike to school and had good experiences, Willms said.
But now the 31,710-square-foot school building, constructed in 1961, is set to close in 2027.
It’s one of eight elementary schools slated for closure under a controversial study seeking the “Most Cost-Effective Remedy” — or MCER — to address capacity and condition needs in Wyoming’s largest school district, Laramie County District 1.
The MCER study presents a major overhaul of the district’s current building makeup by closing more than a quarter of the district’s elementary schools; expanding, replacing or constructing seven other buildings; and relying more on larger 5-6 grade schools. The work would take place through 2035.
The study has created a furor among parents in the district who bemoan the idea of losing small elementary schools they value for access and character in exchange for larger facilities. Critics question the methodology and say the process was conducted with insufficient public input. A petition opposing the plan had collected more than 1,000 signatures by the time the Wyoming School Facilities Commission gave the closures the final stamp of approval. A group called Cheyenne Parent Alliance presented an alternative plan it maintains makes more sense, though the commission declined to choose that alternative.
The final MCER disregarded the impact on the community, relied on a flawed cost-effectiveness analysis and disregarded statutory requirements, said Katie Dijkstal, a Jessup parent, former district teacher and a founding Alliance member.
“Other options were available to address school needs in a balanced and fair manner,” Dijkstal said. “However, we now find ourselves with an extreme and disruptive outcome that does not prioritize and consider students in LCSD1.”
But whether concerned parents can actually intervene in the fate of the schools at this juncture is unclear. Before the facilities commission approved it, the Laramie County School Board voted to concur with the study.
Andy Knapp, the school district’s director of facilities, said he sees great benefit in the study.
“I understand that change is hard,” Knapp said, “but it provides some new educational spaces that are much better than a lot of these old schools that are getting to end-of-life, and it provides much better opportunity, I believe, for the students.”
The study
The MCER study came about through a routine, and statutorily mandated, statewide screening assessment for educational buildings deficient in either conditions or capacity. In that assessment, seven Laramie County buildings were flagged.
That triggered the MCER study. Wyoming’s School Facilities Division hired a third-party contractor to complete the work, which entails weighing options spanning from constructing new buildings or additions to reconfiguring boundaries or eliminating buildings through consolidation. The state hired FEA, a firm specializing in strategic planning and asset management, in January.
Because so many buildings were flagged, FEA conducted a MCER on all the district’s 30 elementary schools.
FEA identified 18 possible remedies, which it whittled down to five. To do so, the consultant team toured schools, sifted through financial reports and capital construction plans and laid out the timelines, costs and benefits for each.
The plan that emerged with the highest score lays out a two-phase process. During the first phase, 2024 to 2030, seven schools are slated to close, starting with Miller Elementary in the fall of 2025. One new and two replacement schools will open during that phase. During phase two, the eighth school, Henderson, will close. Phase two will also entail additions, one replacement school and one brand-new school.
“The evaluation revealed that potential remedies focusing on fewer, larger elementary schools provided the greatest overall advantages, while other solutions were less advantageous,” the report reads. Even if school sizes change, classroom sizes will remain the same, Knapp said.
LCSD1 school board members said they only had about a week to review the study before voting to concur with its findings in October. Critics complained there wasn’t sufficient time to digest the 114 pages — for the board or public.
The MCER’s adoption by the school facilities commission will also allow for the release of funding for two projects the district desperately needs, LCSD1 Superintendent Stephen Newton told WyoFile: a replacement of Arp Elementary School and a new grades 5-6 school.
“The district is pleased to begin this next stage, which will provide much-needed school facilities for the city of Cheyenne,” Newton said in a comment emailed to WyoFile.
Still, many community members spoke in opposition during the school board and facilities commission public comment periods. School board members also expressed distress about the plan’s impacts before voting 8-0 to concur with its findings.
An alternative?
Dirk Dijkstal and Franz Fuchs, Cheyenne fathers representing the parent alliance, made a pitch to the School Facilities Commission for an alternative remedy plan on Nov. 6. During that presentation, the men touted a remedy they said would mitigate legal and community concerns. That plan, which was one of the original 18 identified, did not entail closing schools. It would have maintained the district’s current configuration and addressed both the capacity and condition needs, Dijkstal said, and didn’t involve asking the Legislature for more funds.
The men furnished a petition of signatures supporting that remedy, 1b, and urged the commission to determine independently the most cost-effective solution rather than just approving the consultant’s recommendation. The alliance also penned an 18-page letter before the meeting asking the commission to reject the MCER.
Local community impacts were not properly considered, Dijkstal added, because stakeholders weren’t included.
Where the consultant process did not properly consider community impacts, he said, “we did some of that stakeholder [listening], and we have 1,000 signatures saying ‘please don’t do this, please adopt the most cost-effective remedy, which is actually 1b.’”
Fuchs said the MCER study added a baseline cost to every single option in comparing cost effectiveness that produced incorrect results. He called it a fatal flaw in the comparison.
But Shelby Carlson, School Facilities Division administrator, said the men’s alternative had its own set of complications.
“There are a lot of challenges that come along with 1b,” she said during the commission meeting. The execution would be more complicated, she said, and it doesn’t align with the district’s long-term plan to move toward having 5-6 schools in each of the district’s regions, called triads. “When you look at really logistically deploying this option, it gets very difficult to execute it.”
Commission members acknowledged parental concerns as legitimate but adopted the plan unanimously, saying it contains the best outcomes for the district as a whole.
What’s next
The MCER will create huge hardships for kids who will have to bus to faraway schools so large they will diminish the education experience, Katie Dijkstal of the parent alliance argued.
Her own daughter, a kindergarten student at Jessup, will get shipped to a different school across the interstate under the plan, she said. “This is not the Wyoming educational landscape I signed up for.”
The very premise of the study is misguided, she said.
“They keep talking about this in a way that is insinuating that new buildings equal better education,” she said. “That’s insane.”
Willms too said more outreach would have helped. Something as significant as a school closure deserves a large public outreach campaign, he said — school meetings, family emails, open houses. Instead, “this decision was … just sort of dropped on folks. People are just left to have to deal with it, and I think that’s really sad.”
Knapp told WyoFile the report was steered by the state, not the district, “so it really was not our place to put public comment into the state’s process.”
The parent alliance is not willing to accept the MCER adoption as a finality. The group has held at least one meeting since the adoption and is proceeding on several fronts.
“There are next steps in place, however, now they are legal steps so privacy in those matters will be important,” reads a Nov. 12 Facebook post from the group.
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