As mentioned in Part One, the Archuleta School District Board of Education heard a recommendation from District staff, last week, to authorize Pagosa Peak Open School’s charter for another five-year period, and to permit the school to expand its enrollment beyond what had been authorized five years ago — in 2017, when PPOS first opened its doors on the first floor of the Parelli office building in Aspen Village.
The Board of Education approved the re-authorization… and the new expansion plan, which will allow PPOS to grow its K-8 enrollment over the next several years from 135 students to a maximum of 225 students within the former Parelli building, which has now been purchased by the Pagosa Peak Open School Building Corporation.
(Disclosure: I serve on the Pagosa Peak Open School board of directors, but this editorial series reflects my personal opinions and not necessarily those of the board as a whole.)
PPOS will continue to function as an independent public school.
We want to be clear, however, that the term ‘independent’ has certain limitations. Yes, the school is governed by its own independent board of directors, approves its own budget, runs on its own annual calendar, and is allowed to hire teachers who are ‘qualified’ but who may not have a Colorado teachers certification. The school is allowed certain other ‘freedoms’ in the interests of developing innovative educational methods and techniques.
But as a publicly-funded Colorado school, PPOS must align its curriculum with the same complex set of state-mandated ‘standards’ as all other Colorado public schools. The Colorado Academic Standards are government-defined expectations of what students need to know and be able to do at the end of each grade. According to the Colorado Department of Education, the Standards “stand as the values and content organizers of what Colorado sees as the future skills and essential knowledge for our next generation to be more successful.”
More successful, as opposed to less successful.
For example. Here are the basic mathematical concepts an eighth grader is expected to understand by the end of the year.
Standard 1. The Number System: Know that there are numbers that are not rational, and approximate them by rational numbers.
Standard 2. Algebra and Functions
Expressions & Equations: Work with radicals and integer exponents.
Expressions & Equations: Understand the connections between proportional relationships, lines, and linear equations.
Expressions & Equations: Analyze and solve linear equations and pairs of simultaneous linear equations.
Functions: Define, evaluate, and compare functions.
Functions: Use functions to model relationships between quantities.
Standard 3. Data, Statistics, and Probability
Statistics & Probability: Investigate patterns of association in bivariate data.
Standard 4. Geometry
Geometry: Understand congruence and similarity using physical models, transparencies, or geometry software.
Geometry: Understand and apply the Pythagorean Theorem.
Geometry: Solve real-world and mathematical problems involving volume of cylinders, cones, and spheres.
I’m sure it’s all well and good for adolescents to have the ability to solve pairs of simultaneous linear equations, and to investigate patterns of association in bivariate data. But the mathematics of crucial importance at PPOS has less to do with algebra and more to do with how to pay for $1.2 million worth of building code upgrades.
When PPOS bought the Parelli building, the ‘building use’ changed from ‘office building’ to ‘public school’, and this change generated a very expensive set of required modifications based on local building codes.
Fortunately, the building was barely a decade old, so all the messy asbestos problems often found in older buildings were not an issue.
But there are other issues that demanded the attention of building inspectors, architects and construction companies. One of the more expensive fixes involves the HVAC (Heating-Ventilation-Air Conditioning) system.
HVAC upgrades have been all the rage in public schools, during the past couple of decades, thanks for studies conducted by the HVAC industry. For 150 years, public schools didn’t typically need air conditioning because the traditional school calendar sent the students and teachers home for summer vacation, just as the school buildings were starting to become uncomfortably warm. Ventilation was provided by opening windows. And winter heating typically came from an industrial-sized boiler located somewhere in the heart of the school building… fired by wood, coal, oil or gas.
A modern school, however, is expected to use a high-tech air exchange system to keep the classroom air fresh and at a standardized temperature. Not too hot and not too cold.
And the constant circulation of ‘fresh air’ in schools became an even bigger conceptual issue with the arrival of COVID.
So here’s a real-world math problem that eighth graders are not expected to solve, or even think about. How does a small public charter school find the money to do a $1.2 million building code upgrade? In the case of PPOS, almost half of the money has been awarded by the Colorado Department of Education ‘BEST’ (“Building Excellent Schools Today”) program. Some will be coming out of the school’s annual fund balance, and some will come from grants and donations.
(If you would like to make a donation to the building renovations, you can contact School Director Angela Real-Crossland at areali@ppos.co or 970-317-2151.)
Durango-based FCI Constructors has been hired to perform the upgrades, with construction scheduled for the summer of 2022. This is not FCI’s first school rodeo; they recently completed an expansion project at Mountain Middle School in Durango, and an expansion and renovation project in Ouray.
I mention that PPOS — with a current enrollment of 120 students — is a “small public charter school” because most Colorado charter schools have enrollments of between 300 and 1,000 students. And because the cost of the school facility is the largest single budget item at PPOS, other than staff salaries… and because the 33,000 square foot building can easily accommodate 225 students… and because Colorado schools are funded mainly by a legislatively-determined ‘Per Pupil Revenue’ based on total enrollment…
… an expansion plan makes a lot of financial sense at PPOS, as it heads into its second half-decade.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.