Wichita Kansas | February 28, 2025
By Meg Britton-Mehlisch | Planeta Venus
Families with students at the closing schools say they are concerned the community fostered in the elementary school buildings will be lost in the district’s transition plan.
Voters went to the polls on Tuesday hoping to answer the question of what will happen to the Wichita School District’s dozens of aging facilities and the students and staff that fill them each week. Instead, a vote on a $450 million bond for the district was too close to call, with less than 300 votes dividing the leading no vote and the yes vote as of election night.
The result set up potentially weeks of uncertainty for the families of four district elementary schools that officials announced will close no matter the result of the vote. In the final weeks of the bond campaign, the district made clear that L’Ouverture, OK, Pleasant Valley and Woodland elementary schools would shut their doors.
USD 259 Superintendent Kelly Bielefeld reaffirmed that plan on Wednesday as district officials waited for the final vote tally.
“The board voted for that plan to be what we move forward with,” Bielefeld said. “We'll wait till every vote is counted, obviously, but we will have to adjust and look at timelines depending on how that goes once all the votes are counted.”
District leaders said that what the vote would decide was whether students at the four schools would be moved into several buildings that would be newly renovated with bond funds or if, at the close of the schools, attendance boundaries would be redrawn to direct kids into equally aging buildings.
Bielefeld said no schools will close at the end of this school year but held off giving an exact timeline. Families had voiced concerns at the possibility of sudden closures like those conducted at the end of the 2023–2024 school year when the district shut down Hadley and Jardine middle schools and Clark, Cleveland, Park, and Payne elementary schools.
This next group of closing schools are all located in Northwest Wichita. It’s an area that has the highest concentration of elementary schools as well as some of the district’s most racially and economically diverse neighborhoods.
Pleasant Valley and Woodland’s students are predominantly Hispanic or Latino and L'Ouverture's students are primarily African American. At these three schools more than 90 percent of the children qualify for free and reduced lunch.
Officials say the challenge districtwide is what to do with a swath of school buildings that have made up a well-loved neighborhood school system but now have millions of dollars’ worth of renovation needs and lower than designed for enrollment numbers. The average age of district schools is 60 years old.
A study conducted alongside the creation of a district facility master plan in 2024, found that in order for the elementary schools to run to district standards, they would need to hit about a 600-student enrollment figure each year. The average enrollment at district elementary schools was about 380 students per school in the 2023-2024 school year.
Family perspectives
Speaking ahead of the bond vote, families said the moment came with a mix of emotions. They were emphatic on their love of their school and the support of the building staff. Some were frustrated at their building’s fate. Most said they were uncomfortable without knowing when their children would need to change schools and where they would go.
Families said that it’s the very features that make these elementary buildings difficult financial assets for the district — closeness to families, longevity in the community and small class sizes — that make these schools so beloved by staff and students.
Tabatha Valdez can hear the sound of students playing at OK Elementary from her house. Sometimes those peals of laughter from the playground include those of her 10-year-old son, Daniel, and 8-year-old daughter, Alexia. Valdez lives three blocks from the school, close enough to hear the first morning bell shuffle her kids out the door if they’re running behind.
The comfort the kids feel at OK is a change of pace for the family. Valdez started with her kids, including 12-year-old daughter Brooklyn, at Irving Elementary. That school was their neighborhood school until Valdez’s husband died and she moved the family to a neighborhood near OK Elementary.
At first, the kids enrolled at Park Elementary, so that Valdez could get transportation help from her parents who lived near the building. They switched to OK two years ago after Valdez learned that only one of her children was approved for enrollment at Park. She said her children are flourishing in their neighborhood school.
“They love OK Elementary,” Valdez said. “When they used to go to their old schools they would be like ‘Mom, I’m going to pretend I’m sick,’ so they wouldn’t have to go. I can honestly say they've never said that about OK.”
Valdez said her kids love being able to walk to school, the small class sizes and living near their school friends. She said they tell her “They’re not fighting to get help if they don’t understand something.”
Devin Greenway is the mother of two current Woodland students — Arlo, 7, and Ares, 10 — and one Marshall middle schooler, Rafael, 11. Her sons feel as comfortable at Woodland as they do at home.
“The teachers really know how to make you feel like your kid is safe at school and make them feel heard and seen,” Greenway said. “It’s a really good school to go to because it’s like an extension of family… It's small. Everybody’s in the neighborhood, it’s your neighbors going to the same school.”
She said the school doesn’t just sit in the community; it creates community. She rattled off a list of events that draw her family back to the school even after the final bell: Hispanic heritage night, Black culture night, a glow dance and a paint and popcorn night.
Greenway said the building is an institution, not just in the neighborhood, but in her family’s history as well. Greenway’s mother attended the school. Greenway’s boys love trading stories with their grandmother about what has and hasn’t changed since she was a Woodland student.
It’s a story that many families in the area share.
Carina Trujillo-Quezada is a paraprofessional at Pleasant Valley Elementary. Her children, Yarixa, 8; Gianna, 7; Jayla, 5; and Pablo, 3; all attend the school — the same one she and her siblings attended.
Trujillo-Quezada said that Pleasant Valley was at the center of so many of her and her children’s relationships in the neighborhood. Her kids see their classmates at church, she sees some of her students at Walmart.
“It’s great for my kids to build stronger relationships,” Trujillo-Quezada said. “Even teacher, para to students. They know that we’re not just a teacher that lives at the school. We’re a person in the neighborhood.”
Tori Clark is an English for speakers of other languages teacher and former fourth grade teacher at Pleasant Valley Elementary. Last school year, about 45 percent of the building’s 275 students were English Language Learners, meaning English was not their first or primary language.
Clark sent her two older sons to school at Pleasant Valley. Her youngest son is a kindergartener in the building. Up until she began splitting time at McLean Science and Technology Magnet this year, she’d spent her 13-year teaching career in Pleasant Valley.
She said the building’s smallness helps foster lasting relationships with families in the neighborhood.
“I know most students’ first and last names —I know their siblings,” Clark said. “I know there’s a lot of kids now in elementary school [who] I taught their siblings that have graduated high school or grown now.”
She said it’s special “to feel that real small community” in a large urban district.
What do families want
Despite the deep connections families have to the four elementary schools, some parents interviewed said they understood the district’s position on the state of the buildings.
As part of the facilities master plan, consultants reviewed repair needs at each of the buildings in the district and assigned the building a facility condition index. The index looked at what the cost was to repair a building versus replacing it. Any building where the index was greater than 50% was considered in poor condition and any building greater than 65% was considered a candidate for replacement.
Woodland was rated at 47%, L’Ouverture was 60%, OK was 73% and Pleasant Valley was 79%.
Clark and Trujillo-Quezada said that Pleasant Valley needs some major work.
Clark said at one point last year, the building was down to one working bathroom stall for all the students and staff. She said there have been fixes, but that the building still doesn’t really have working bathrooms or hot water. She said some classes have a single outlet to power the room. Trujillo-Quezada said that she’s had to work with kids that are having trouble focusing because the building is too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.
“Before they announced the first round of closures, we actually thought we’d be on the first chop down just because of how old the building is — it’s not fully functioning,” Clark said.
Greenway said that while she feels Woodland’s not in bad shape, she’s concerned about what happens if the bond fails and her kids are redirected into schools that haven’t had repairs.
Greenway said she’s supporting the bond because if it passes, the district has presented a plan on when schools would be rebuilt and how students would be divided at schools. She said she’d vote yes just to give her children a couple more years at their elementary school.
Clark and Trujillo-Quezada also planned to vote yes on the bond.
Valdez said she values the stability her children have at OK more than anything.
She said she planned to vote no because she feels burned by the district’s prior building management and bonds. Woodland, Pleasant Valley and OK were expanded or renovated through the 2000 and 2008 bonds. L’Ouverture was expanded with money from the 2000 bond.
Valdez said she also feels like the district should have sold Park Elementary, which was purchased by the city of Wichita for $1, for more money and put the profit from the sale into the closing schools.
Valdez, who is currently attending the surgical tech program at Wichita State University and working, said she’s considering homeschooling her kids.
“I told the kids I don’t like [having] no stability and hopping around,” Valdez said. “I’m up in the air because the other school I would have chosen would have been Woodland and they’re going to close that one too.”
Election officials had until Friday, Feb. 28 to count mail-in bond ballots. The results of the vote won’t be official until the canvas vote is completed on March 6. At the time of publication, 27,513 ballots had been counted, and the no vote led the yes vote by 295 votes.
Meg Britton-Mehlisch is a general assignment reporter for KMUW and the Wichita Journalism Collaborative. She began reporting for both in late 2024. Planeta Venus is a member of the WJC. |
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