The Kyrene School District’s governing board will take a major vote to decide how many schools to close. Not if schools should close — how many. They could close up to eight schools in the East Valley district.
With declining enrollment and rising costs, governing board President Kevin Walsh told The Show it wouldn’t be financially responsible to keep all of their schools open at this point. But they’re not the only ones.
There has been a wave of school closures across our state of late. On Monday on The Show, Arizona State University education professor Sherman Dorn said this trend is being spurred by a lot of things. People are having fewer kids, we have open enrollment in Arizona, where you don’t have to go to your neighborhood school, plus a host of charter schools in our state — and the nation’s first universal school voucher program.
"And there's a third factor, which is the pandemic. And families experiences of schooling during the pandemic raised questions about their relationship with school," Dorn said.
The Show looked at Kryene as a sort of case study of what happens when a district is faced with these tough choices. Walsh spoke on The Show about the decision ahead of them and what he thinks is leading to all of this.
Full conversation
KEVIN WALSH: In our community, a lot of it is the declining birth rates and it's also the accessibility of the housing market. So when you think about it, we are a K-8 district, which means the families that we serving have young kids and they tend to be younger families.
And as housing prices continue to go up and up in our community, there's not a lot of inventory for them to buy. They can't afford to live in our community. And in many cases, we've had families that moved into our community 20, 30 years ago. They loved it. They sent their kids to our schools, and our schools gave them an education through eighth grade and they graduated on. But those families didn't leave. They haven't sold their house.
So you're not seeing that same influx of students moving in. So that's why some of our communities out in the deep East Valley, the deep West Valley, they're not seeing these same challenges of declining enrollment, because that's where the new builds are. But in communities like Phoenix and Tempe and parts of, you know, the older parts of Chandler, there's just not that growth of families coming in.
GILGER: And no one's switching over their housing.
WALSH: Yeah, exactly.
GILGER: It's really interesting. OK, so let's then back up, Kevin, and just talk about how you decide to do this, like, how do you even begin to decide which school gets to stay open and which school gets to close?
WALSH: It's a big process. So what we did is the board decided to form a committee. They did an open call to the public to apply if you wanted to be part of that conversation. We had about 60 different community members that ended up being on the committee. They've been meeting since January. So this process has been going on for almost all of 2025.
And they looked at the finances, they looked at the budget, and their initial conversation was: Do we want to close schools? And if so, how many? And then once they knew how many schools they wanted to close or consolidate, they had a few options to consider.
What the board has been doing ever since then is getting community feedback. Decide whether we want to take that recommendation and adopt it its entirety. Whether we want to say, no, this is not something we want to do right now, or whether there's something in between.
GILGER: So what are you hearing from folks like, I'm sure this is raising a lot of passionate feelings in the community.
WALSH: You get feedback from all over the community and lots of different, varied opinions. You know, you have some people that don't want you to close any schools. You have some people who understand that schools need to close, but they have questions or concerns with the process and why their particular school was chosen for closure.
GILGER: Yeah, "Why mine?"
WALSH: And you've got other people that are at the opposite end and say, actually, we're really concerned if you don't close as many schools as was recommended to you.
These are lots of different conversations, and I think most of the families and teachers that we are hearing from are wanting to ensure that this process is transparent, and that the board is taking into effect all of the relevant information in making a decision that is going to have a huge impact on our community. Because that's not lost on us that consolidating a school is a hard thing. And it's going to impact those kids, and it's going to impact those teachers, and it's going to impact that staff.
GILGER: I was interviewing someone in public education recently, and she said something about how, you know, we talk a lot about the policy around schools and the funding of schools, but we often forget that there are hundreds of little souls in those schools. Is that part of this conversation?
WALSH: It has to be. It can't just be numbers. You have to keep the center of the conversation on students, because that's why we're here.
GILGER: So what does this look like for students? If you get rid of some schools, close some schools, some students have to move to new schools. Do you keep them together?
WALSH: Yeah. The goal is always to try to minimize change and keep people together. So in most instances, if you're at a school that's set to be closed or consolidated, you going to be moving with all of your kiddos and your classmates to another school.
Same thing with staff and teachers, in most part because your teaching jobs follow the students, right. So just because we're moving students from one school to another doesn't mean we don't need teachers for those students.
GILGER: But do you need as many?
WALSH: We're going to hope that we can keep as many together as we possibly can. Our district is always hiring. So to the extent that there's going to be any sort of changeover in a position, it may be that there's another opportunity at another school for them.
GILGER: So it's a lot of shuffling around. What about when they get to these new schools? How do you kind of incorporate probably a lot of new students into a new campus? Like, will classes be larger?
WALSH: So that's one thing that people sometimes have a misunderstanding on. They think that our class sizes are going to go up. In fact, we may have more students on a campus, but our class sizes might actually go down.
And the reason is we're going to have more classrooms per grade level. So if you think about it, right now, our schools are so small, we've got some grade levels that only have two classes at first grade, right.
And if you've got a family that moves in or families that move in during the school year, and we've got 10 new kids, well, there's only two classes we can put them in. So now all of a sudden our classes are going up really quickly. If we've got five or six different grade level classes and those same families move in, you can actually keep your class sizes down.
It also allows for teachers to collaborate more. So there's some opportunities that by having more kids on one campus, you can actually better staff your resources.
GILGER: That's interesting. I want to talk about the kind of underlying issue here. You have pointed out that public schools in Arizona have just not been funded highly enough for a very long time. And you think that's kind of the underlying big elephant in the room, I guess.
How does this connect? Like, how does that funding impact these school closures? Connect the dots for us.
WALSH: It goes to the heart of why we're having conversations about school closure. So, Arizona continues to underfund public education and that means we have less and less resources. And in particular, since COVID our students needs have not gotten any less. In fact, our students needs have grown. So because we continue to underfund public education, our resources are getting stretched and stretched more.
And that's why we have to consolidate resources. We have to try to cut costs every single place we can. Because in Arizona, we have different sets of rules for where public money goes to education. We have voucher programs that are largely unregulated. We've got charter schools, which don't play by the same set of rules as your public district schools.
GILGER: In what way?
WALSH: Well, there's many ways that they don't have to comply, in fact, including transportation. And there's also great literature out there about charter schools not accepting children that have high needs, whether that's on a special-needs kid, IEP ... also kids with behavior. So a lot of those kids end up coming to their neighborhood district school, and we're happy to have them.
But make no mistake, what you're creating is a system where your neighborhood public schools are servicing all the kids, including a disproportionate group of kids that may have higher needs and therefore require more funding and resources to adequately meet those needs.
GILGER: So, are you, as a public and district school trying to compete with those charter schools to get kids trying to compete with private schools that can now, you know, you can use a public voucher to go to that private school? Even district schools competing among each other to sort of say, we have this specialty program, or we can send your kid here or give them a bilingual education or everything that schools kind of have to specialize in now it seems we have to.
WALSH: We have to. We have to be competitive. And —
GILGER: And you think you can't as much because of this kind of funding issue?
WALSH: I think the funding issue makes it much harder for your neighborhood public schools to compete. And I think part of the reason we're having to consolidate our resources is because we want any kid that lives in our community to go to a Kyrene school. Not because they have to, but because they want to.
And because they have so many options out there, whether that's a charter school or a private school or otherwise. We have to make sure that we are providing the best educational opportunity, experience for those kids. And the whole reason we're having this conversation is if we keep 25 schools open, with declining enrollment and decreased funding, we don't think we can continue to deliver excellent education to our kids in the same way.
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