Anchorage School Board to decide fate of JBER elementary school

This school year might be the last for Mount Spurr Elementary School.

Anchorage School District administrators have proposed closing the one-story school, tucked near a neighborhood on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. Not enough students attend Mount Spurr and two nearby elementary schools, Orion and Aurora, to justify keeping all three of them opened, the district administration says. By divvying the students between two schools, opportunities and resources for students and teachers will also expand, said Tom Roth, district chief operating officer.

Some parents of Mount Spurr students say, however, the school has the highest enrollment of the three and shouldn’t be shut down. They’ve praised the school’s teachers, its staff and the sense of community it fosters. Some said they also like the school because their children can walk to it.

“Mount Spurr isn’t a building, it’s a family,” said Mount Spurr parent Alba Colon. Her son attends first grade at the school. “Mount Spurr is awesome,” she said. “I love it.”

The seven-member Anchorage School Board will make the ultimate decision about whether to shutter Mount Spurr, built in 1954. The board is expected to vote on the closure at its 7 p.m. meeting Monday.

Together, Mount Spurr, Orion and Aurora are operating at a combined 48 percent utilization rate this school year -- defined as the number of students they enroll compared to how many they have room for, Roth said. Aurora and Orion are located within about 1,000 feet of each other on JBER, while Mount Spurr is about 2 miles away.

“This is unique -- three schools clustered very closely,” Roth said.

There are also two elementary schools on the other side of JBER: Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.

Enrollment has fallen at Mount Spurr, Aurora and Orion this school year compared to last year. According to the district, Mount Spurr enrolled 247 students as of late September (78 percent of its capacity), Aurora enrolled 177 students (33 percent of its capacity) and Orion enrolled 227 students (45 percent of its capacity).

In an April report, a consultant hired by the school district suggested closing a different school in the trio: Orion.

The consultant, Shannon Bingham, said at the time that the size of the population on JBER wasn’t expected to swell soon and some of its schools had a lot of space. According to Bingham’s calculations, Aurora and Orion had the lowest utilization rates of Anchorage neighborhood schools.

The school district is recommending closing Mount Spurr instead because Orion has more classrooms, so it can better handle any population increases on JBER, Roth said.

Orion was originally built in 1958 as a middle school, he said. It has 24 classrooms, Aurora has 25 classrooms and Mount Spurr has 17.

Aurora, built in 1954, recently underwent upgrades to its gym, classrooms and office, according to the school district.

Another critical factor: The district’s Fine Arts Department is housed in a wing of Orion, Roth said. There are offices on the first floor. The district also stores hundreds of instruments in Orion’s basement, which Roth said was originally built as a bomb shelter. Bruce Wood, director of the department, described it as a 3,000-square-foot “nuclear fallout shelter.”

“No one intended it to be a wonderfully, humidity-controlled environment. But because it’s in a basement with not much airflow, it is,” Wood said. “That humidity control doesn’t matter quite so much for our wind instruments, but for our string instruments, it’s critical.”

The district stores roughly 1,500 instruments in the basement during the summer. Many of those instruments are rented out to students during the school year. Staff also perform some instrument repairs in the basement.

“There’s just nowhere else in the district where they would have a facility like that,” Wood said. “They’d have to close down another whole school for us to move into.”

But Chelsea Iliff, another Mount Spurr parent, said it just doesn’t seem right to close Mount Spurr. Iliff and her family moved to Anchorage in July. They picked their housing on JBER, she said, because of the good things they’d heard about Mount Spurr. Weeks after school started, they heard Mount Spurr might close. That’s tough, she said, especially since the school has provided some stability for children of military families -- some who have a parent who is deployed.

“That ability to give them some stability, to go to the same school for a couple years, that means a lot to kids,” Iliff said.

Iliff has two sons at Mount Spurr. They can see the school from their home, she said.

“To me, it is invaluable to have a school that’s within walking distance to my house,” Iliff said.

Iliff said she felt it was unfair that the district was lumping all three schools together when describing the issue of too much space and not enough students.

“We do a pretty good job of filling the seats at Mount Spurr,” she said. “We’ve also got an excellent attendance rate and I think that’s because so many of us are right in the neighborhood.”

Roth said he wanted to underscore that the school district isn’t making its recommendation based on the merits of the schools.

“All these schools, frankly, are excellent schools,” he said. “It’s not a comparison or an evaluation of the performance of the schools, they’re really all high-performing elementary schools.”

If the school board does decide to shutter Mount Spurr, the closure would take effect at the end of the school year. The school building is currently owned by the Municipality of Anchorage. If the school is closed, ownership of the building would be transferred to the Department of the Air Force.

Closing Mount Spurr would save the district roughly $576,000 next school year and the following year, Roth told the school board earlier this month. The net savings would decrease each year after that because of the way state funding works. Eventually, in year five, it would result in a net loss of about $71,600, Roth told the board.

Consolidating the three schools is more about the ability to expand educational opportunities, Roth said. More students at a school means more teachers.

If the school board does decide to close Mount Spurr, the school’s students would be divided between Aurora and Orion next school year. The district said that could put Aurora at about 65 percent of its enrollment capacity and Orion at about 60 percent.