Why Tucson Unified School District may close up to 10 schools in the coming years

The Tucson Unified School District is considering closing up to 10 schools in the coming years.

The district has hired a consultant to help it figure out the next steps and a final decision is expected later this year.

Gabriel Trujillo is TUSD’s superintendent, and he joined The Show to talk about it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Gabriel, good morning. Thanks for being here.

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Yeah, good morning, Mark. Thanks for having me, giving me an opportunity to talk about this very difficult, difficult moment for us.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, I would imagine this is not the easiest thing. So are you witnessing and experiencing the same kinds of things that districts elsewhere around Arizona are in terms of just fewer students to have seats in these schools?

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Yes, it actually is a confluence of events and factors and variables that really combine to make a really, really ugly cocktail for those of us in the K-12 business. First, you have historically low birth rates here in Pima County affecting much of the ... Tucson Unified School District attendance boundaries.

Then you have a shrinking population of K-12 students inside of our attendance zones. The Tucson Unified School District, we span 225 square miles. And five years ago, within this border, we had about 56,000 available K-12 age students zoned to our schools, and now that number has dipped to 52,500.

Tucson Unified School District

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So economic flight and immigration are two very, very big factors as folks either fear the recent immigration crackdowns or look for a cheaper cost of living outside of the district's boundaries. So we also have folks that, waiting longer to have kids, older homeowners in a lot of sectors of our district where kids are grown. Really these factors have brought us to this point.

MARK BRODIE: It's interesting, the immigration issue, I wonder if that is maybe more acute in a district like yours than it might be in some districts up in the Phoenix area.

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Well, we're the state's largest border district. We're 45 minutes from the international border. The Tucson Unified School District, we've historically had the largest population of refugee and migrant students in the state, definitely here in Pima County.

We've seen reductions in those student counts over the last couple of years. We've also seen very high levels of absenteeism for families as they deal with the fear and anxiety of not being sure that their children would be safe coming to school. That's been a tremendous challenge for us.

MARK BRODIE: So what are you going to be looking at? How will you decide how many and which schools will be closing? Because it seems as though some number of them will be closing.

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Yes. So ... we've got a really strong community advisory committee representative of all kinds of families and representative of all kinds of stakeholders, a variety of perspectives, parents, teachers, some of our union leadership. We have representatives from some of the elected offices here in the city of Tucson.

And we're really going to be looking at each particular school's enrollment history over the last five years. We're going to be looking at the percentage of students that each particular school captures within its attendance boundary, the percentage of students that it might be losing to charters and privates.

We also will be looking at just the availability of K-12 age students in each particular neighborhood. We'll also look at spatial capacity, the percentage of each building that is going unused right now due to lower enrollment. We'll look at the presence of vulnerable populations in schools. So obviously a school with a large proportion of the student body qualifying for disabilities under special education or a large percentage of the student body emerging bilingual students learning English as a second language, that may not be a school that we look at at this time.

So programmatic offerings matter as well, student-body composition matters as well. We'll also look at the proximity to charters and private schools in the area and whether or not that school can be viable in the future. So these are some of the big factors that we'll be looking at to make these decisions.

MARK BRODIE: You mentioned proximity to charters and privates. Are you also going to be considering like the geography of the schools that you have in terms of if a student is in a school now that closes, maybe having one relatively close by as opposed to having them have to travel across town to get to school?

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Yeah, our true north is always going to be academic quality. So this isn't just really about balancing a budget or dealing with any kind of deficit. We really do believe that this is an opportunity to build a better, more competitive academic product to enhance access and opportunity to programs, extracurricular programs, academic quality.

It is really hard to do that in a school of 100 students. It's hard to offer a full-time music teacher. It's hard to offer gifted and talented instruction. It's hard to offer the preschool program in a school of that size. When that school combines with another school that has all those resources, we can really do right by those 100 kids and be competitive and not risk losing some of those students to our competitors.

So we're also going to be looking at grade-band adjustments. It's not just about school consolidations, but we might have some schools that might work better as a K-8 versus being a K-5 school. Or we have some schools that we might be looking at that might be secondary academies, right? Might take one of our high schools and experiment with making that high school a 7-12 model, much like was done in the Peoria Unified School District.

So those are some of the thoughts and ideas that we have around this project, and ultimately it is about helping us be more competitive.

MARK BRODIE: Right. All right, we'll have to leave it there. That is Gabriel Trujillo, the superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time.

GABRIEL TRUJILLO: Thanks, Mark. Have a great day.