While my daughter Ursala has now moved on to other projects, resigning from the role of Board President for Pagosa Peak Open School (PPOS) after 8 years, the school itself continues to explore techniques for providing young people with the intellectual and social tools they will need to navigate the 21st century.
We are sharing a story about some of those efforts, this morning, in an article by PPOS Instructional Coach Emily Murphy.
Disclosure: I currently serve on the volunteer Board of Directors for Pagosa Peak Open School, but this editorial reflects only my own opinions, and not necessarily those of the Board as a whole, nor of the school staff, parents, or students.
The 21st century will be — and already is — a different societal landscape from the one most Daily Post readers moved through, during the 20th century. For one thing, we now live in an environment of instant access to information. Do you want to know what Thomas Jefferson thought of the Second Amendment? You can find a range of opinions within seconds. Ditto, the reasons why the largest water reservoir in the U.S. — Lake Mead — is less than one-third full, and why that might have important implications for us, here in Pagosa Springs.
How do you make yogurt at home? You can easily find out. How much should you invest in a 401K to make sure you have $1 million when you retire? You can learn stuff like that with the touch of a few buttons, or a spoken command.
When I attended third grade, back in 1960, we were taught to memorize the multiplication table for the numbers 1 through 10. (I wish we had learned 1 through 12, but that’s another subject.) In a real sense, knowing the multiplication table was an essential tool for unraveling mathematical problems, in school and in life.
Below is an interesting version of the multiplication table, with the boxes proportional to the multiplied results. (This particular table also displays the prime number factors that can generate those products, in case that information is useful.)
As much as I have appreciated knowing how to multiply and divide in my head… still, 90% of the mathematics I was taught in school — algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus — I have yet to find a use for.
Knowing the multiplication table can still be a useful skill, for some people… but if you carry around an iPhone, it’s basically unnecessary. Your phone can multiply and divide large numbers much more quickly and accurately than a normal human.
I think what’s more important, in 2023, is knowing how to best use your iPhone.
There are, indeed, good and not-so-good ways to use a phone. But this essential skill has not yet made its way into the typical school curriculum. And it seems the authors of the standardized tests, required by the state of Colorado, have not yet realized that knowing how to use an iPhone is one of the essential skills required in the 21st century.
Other changes have taken place since 1960, beyond the issues of school curriculum and phone use… including a decision by the Colorado legislature to fund, with public money, ‘schools of choice’. One key decision was made in 1993, to allow the funding of a particular brand of ‘schools of choice’ designated as “charter schools”.
When the Pagosa Charter School Initiative began writing its charter application in 2016, we understood some of the major challenges we were facing. One challenge was finding a suitable building to house our new school; another would be, paying the cost of that building.
Archuleta School District, like most school districts in Colorado, funds its school buildings through bond issues. In the case of ASD, the most recent school bond issue was approved by the voters in 1996, to fund the design and construction of a new Pagosa Springs High School, which opened its doors in 1998. The older high school building, in the heart of downtown, became the Pagosa Springs Middle School.
The money for paying off the 1996 high school bond issue has been coming directly from property taxes, separate from the PPR — Per Pupil Revenue — that pays for ASD staff salaries, programs, and operations.
Typically, conventional public schools do not have the use their PPR to pay off their construction loans.
But in Colorado, charter schools are rarely (if ever?) able to fund the cost of their building through a community-approved bond issue. So the funds paying for PPOS’ school building in Aspen Village comes mainly out of the PPR. PPOS dedicates about 16% of its annual budget to paying the mortgage. The school’s Building Corporation also spent about $1.2 million last year, doing a major remodel. Naturally, this leaves less money per student than what a conventional public school typically has available, to pay for salaries and operations.
‘Financial creativity’ is therefore an important aspect of maintaining and operating a charter school. ‘Financial ambition’ is also helpful, including grant writing.
When PPOS opened its doors in September 2017, serving grades K-4, the enrollment was about 65 students, and the Per Pupil Revenue was about $7,600 per enrolled student (coming from a mix of local property taxes and state income and other taxes). We understood that we were going to be living precariously… and if we had not received a series of significant grants from the Walton Foundation, I have no idea how the school would have survived.
We had been advised that a Colorado charter school needed an enrollment of about 250 students in order to comfortably cover its rent and operational costs, and provide decent staff salaries. We had about 1/4 that number. We were, however, planning to add one additional grade each year, until we were serving grades K-8. The more students we could enroll, the better to spread out the financial burden of running the school…
We would eventually serve about 135 students.
If all went as planned.
Then COVID arrived, and Colorado public schools began seeing a drop in enrollment. In Denver, for example, the school district was proposing to close 10 schools due to lack of enrollment; the School Board ended up closing three of them — two elementary schools and a middle school.
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.