Arapahoe Schools pursuing K-12 unification

(Lander, WY) – Wyoming’s last K-8 school district is pursuing unification.

Arapahoe Schools Interim Superintendent David Holbert approached the Fremont County Commission this month in Lander to talk about the district’s desire to become a “unified” K-12 system – a goal that school officials have talked about internally for years but never formally pursued until now.

“I’ve been with Arapahoe Schools for 14 years, (and) ever since I’ve been there, we’ve been talking about unification,” Holbert said. “(We) just never got anything off the ground.”

This year, however, Holbert said he mentioned the idea to a Wyoming Department of Education representative who offered to help Fremont County School District 38 navigate the unification process, which is outlined in Title 21 of Wyoming Statute and involves approval from the local boundary board – consisting of the county assessor, the county treasurer, and the board of county commissioners.

“We have to come to you (with) a proposal,” Holbert explained. “So I’d just like to take a couple of minutes (today) to make sure that, if there was a reason for a hard ‘no,’ that we didn’t go through the time and effort to prepare it and then walk in here and just hear, … ‘No.’”

Benefits

During his presentation last week, Holbert outlined several reasons Arapahoe School officials feel unification would benefit “both our students and the county as a whole.”

For example, if FCSD 38 were a K-12 district, Holbert said the State of Wyoming would fund track-and-field infrastructure for Arapahoe Schools.

“Right now we aren’t funded like every other district in the state, (so) our sixth through eighth grade students never had a track and field until we … built our own,” he said. “The state should have funded it, but we’re defined as a K-8 elementary, and so they went, ‘Well, you’ve got a playground over there, so that’s everything you need. You guys don’t need a football field. You guys don’t need these other things.’ So the funding gets really strange for us at times.”

The K-8 designation also limits the amount of state funding FCSD 38 receives for gym space, Holbert continued, explaining that the district only gets “fully funded for one gymnasium.”

FCSD 38 also receives partial funding for the “old gym” on campus, Holbert added – but both facilities only offer a single court each, and FCSD 38 currently has five basketball teams and two cheer squads.

“(The teams) are competing for space to practice,” Holbert said. “There’s no room. … So if we did become K–12, we’d be able to get a new high school, and with that we would be able to get more gym space and open those kinds of things up.”

A new high school would also bring additional jobs to Fremont County, Holbert said, and it would ease capacity concerns at Arapaho Charter High School – an institution that was intended to offer students a “much smaller” classroom environment than they might experience elsewhere.

“Currently we’re a little over 60 students at our charter high school,” he said. “We would like to drop that down to about 25 so that we can continue to meet those types of needs.”

Students at a unified Arapahoe School District would have more access to career and technical education too, Holbert said, calling that a “huge advantage.”

“Currently we have pretty limited (CTE),” he said, attributing the situation in part to “our size and funding.” “If we’re able to become K–12, that’s going to start opening up more of those options for us to be able to use.”

Another educational benefit of unification would be a reduction in the number of students leaving the FCSD 38 after eighth grade, Holbert said, noting that student mobility – or switching schools – can negatively impact academic performance.

“Currently we force almost all of our eighth-graders to change schools,” Holbert said. “We’re taking between 35 and 45 students a year, roughly, and saying, ‘Go somewhere else.’ … I would like to cut down on that.”

Students who live in FCSD 38 but attend school in another district don’t have representation on their local school board, Holbert pointed out, so unification “would increase local control” as well.

Moving forward

No formal action was taken during last week’s meeting, but the commissioners in attendance during Holbert’s presentation indicated that he should proceed with developing an application for unification for consideration by the boundary board. 

They also emphasized the need for public engagement as part of the process.

“I’m anticipating that this is going to raise some questions,” Commissioner Mike Jones said. “(We’re) talking about building another high school. … I think there will be questions that come up.”

One of those questions arose during last week’s discussion, when commissioners asked whether unification would increase the amount of local property tax revenue flowing to FCSD 38.

The answer was no, according to Fremont County Assessor Tara Berg, who said FCSD 38 would be “taking on more students with that same amount of money” if it became a K-12 district.

About 420 students currently attend Arapahoe Schools, Holbert said, and if the district is unified, he anticipated enrollment would increase by about 100.