Scottsbluff school district closing elementary school due to budget constraints

When Brett Moser picked up his first grader from Lake Minatare Elementary school outside Scottsbluff on Tuesday, the boy asked his dad if he wanted to hear something sad.

“He said, ‘They're going to close my school,’” Moser said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I know. I was at some meetings where they decided to do it and to discuss doing it. We tried as parents to do our best to stop it from happening. But it does happen.”

The Scottsbluff Public Schools Board of Education voted 5-1 in a special meeting on Monday to close Lake Minatare Elementary school after this academic year. It’s the smallest elementary in the district with about 65 students, according to district numbers.

Andrew Dick, superintendent of Scottsbluff Public Schools, said the conversation about closing the school initially started after a law capping district budget growth at 3% went into effect. He said the district cut $1.3 million last year and $1.8 million the year before, and is now estimating a need to cut $950,000 for next school year.

The closure of Lake Minatare Elementary is projected to save around $750,000.

“It was a difficult, difficult decision to make, and a great deal of thought and consideration went into it, but at the end of the day, we needed to make a decision that was in the best interest of all students within our district,” Dick said. “We understand that those difficult decisions when they're surrounded by fiscal responsibility certainly impact real people and real programs. It definitely was not a decision that was taken lightly.”

Dick said the board will vote on absorbing the Lake Minatare boundaries into Longfellow, the next nearest elementary school in the district, at its meeting on Monday.

Moser, who is also a teacher in a neighboring school district, said he is worried how adding more students in other schools will impact teachers.

“The district has told us that they're going to do their best to try to keep class sizes as low as they can, or at the caps,” he said. “I know it will obviously increase class sizes for other teachers, and as a teacher, I know that's hard.”

There are five teachers employed at Lake Minatare. Dick said officials will prioritize finding jobs for them elsewhere in the district. He added there are typically 20 to 25 openings at the end of every school year, so he anticipates it will be easy to find them new positions.

Taylor Luikens, who has a kindergartner at Lake Minatare and another headed to school next year, said she is concerned with how the closure will impact getting her children to and from school or picking them up from the bus stop.

“We are looking at having to either hire somebody who will be available that can pick our kids up after school, or we're having to look at trying to get into an after-school care program, which is another charge,” she said. “We have to pay for the after-school program. It's also extremely hard to get into the after-school programs. There is a waitlist.”

She said people’s salaries don’t always increase 3% like a school district budget does. Luikens added that she’s concerned property taxes may go up to make up for a loss of $400,000 in state aid that came from a special line item tied to Lake Minatare Elementary called the elementary site allowance.

“It's just important to realize what the public school system is for,” Luikens said. “It's for our children. It's for educating our children. It's not a for-profit organization. Schools should not run free. It should be an investment”

District officials say it’s too soon to tell if property taxes will increase or decrease because they are still waiting to hear state aid calculations for next school year and how much the district’s special education reimbursement will be, but the district’s overall budget won’t decrease from the loss of the $400,000 elementary site allowance.

Katy Fleming, a banker who had two children who went to Lake Minatare and one currently enrolled, said she was confused by some of the financial decisions the district made the past few years, like choosing to pay off bonds early. She also said there are capital outlay projects wrapping up and wondered where that money would go when construction was done.

“In my mind, prioritizing your finances and where the money goes over a kid's education is quite concerning,” Fleming said. “I think they could have done better.”

Fleming said her kids had a great experience at the school, which received an “excellent” rating from the Nebraska Department of Education.

“The learning is wonderful,” Fleming said. “The teacher staff out there is wonderful. The teachers out at Lake Minatare want to be there because of the community of kids that's out there.”