Total enrollment in Archuleta School District schools has dropped by about 10% since 2019. But enrollment has been increasing at Pagosa Peak Open School.
PPOS is officially an ASD public school, and is tuition-free and open to all Archuleta County families, but is governed by an independent volunteer board. PPOS has seen its enrollment increase from 106 in 2023… to 129 students this school year. Based on current enrollment trends, PPOS may have as many as 148 students next school year.
ASD had an enrollment of 1,742 students in 2019. This year, the district enrollment is 1,583 (according to the Colorado Department of Education). A recent report by a Colorado demographer suggested continuing declines in ASD enrollment.
While researching some historical background on education trends for this article, I pulled out one of my favorite books on the subject of American public education:
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto, published in 1992.
Mr. Gatto taught in public schools for over 30 years and was honored with the ‘New York City Teacher of the Year Award’ as well as the ‘New York State Teacher of the Year Award’.
His book critiques numerous aspects of modern education.
Many of us are less than happy with the current state of education, but for widely different reasons. One of the aspects that bothered Mr. Gatto was summarized in Chapter 4, “We Need Less Schooling, Not More”.
For one hundred and fifty years, institutional education has seen fit to offer, as its main purpose, economic success. Good education = good job, good money, good ‘things’… This prescription makes both parents and students easier to regulate and intimidate as long as the connection goes unchallenged either for its veracity or in its philosophical truth…
…The absurdity of defining education as an economic good becomes clear if we ask ourselves what is gained by perceiving education as a way to enhance even further the runaway consumption that threatens the earth, the air and the water of this planet.
Should we continue to teach children that they can buy happiness, in the face of a tidal wave of evidence that they cannot?
Good question. Maybe an even better question in 2026, than it was in 1992. For those of us who follow the news, we’re hearing regularly that computer-driven systems — commonly referred to as “AI” — will be making certain types of human workers unnecessary. The AI-developers at Anthropic released an analysis this past March, Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence.
A short excerpt from that 17-page report:
We find that computer programmers, customer service representatives, and financial analysts are among the most exposed. Using survey data from the US, we find no impact on unemployment rates for workers in the most exposed occupations, although there’s tentative evidence that hiring into those professions has slowed slightly for workers aged 22-25.
The graphic on page 6 shows the types of jobs most likely to be replaced. The red shape indicates already-observed job losses; the blue shape indicates the jobs likely to disappear in the near future.
The safest career appears to be “Grounds maintenance.”
I find this graphic fascinating, because it appears that some of the jobs that have required a college education — business and finance, architecture, engineering, legal professions, teaching, medical practice — are those most threatened by advanced computer systems (“AI”). Jobs that do not require a college degree but rather require physical labor are generally less threatened.
Are our public schools likely to recognize these trends?
In particular and more importantly… if the Archuleta School District is preparing to abandon two downtown school facilities and build a new $126 million PreK-8 facility to provide 21st century education… is ASD recognizing these trends?
Disclosure: I currently serve as a volunteer on the Pagosa Peak Open School board of directors, but this editorial reflects only my own personal opinions and not necessarily the opinions of the PPOS board or staff.
A few more thoughts from Mr. Gatto’s 1992 book:
What, after all this time, is the purpose of mass schooling supposed to be? Reading, writing and arithmetic can’t be the answer, because properly approached, those skills take less than a hundred hours to transmit — and we have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time.
Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network of strangers for twelve years? Surely not so a few of them can get rich? Even if it worked that way, and I doubt it does, why wouldn’t a sane community look on such an education system as positively wrong? It divides and classifies children, demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and label the losers by literally ‘de-grading’ them, identifying them as ‘low-class’ material.
And the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff!
I don’t believe that anyone who thinks about that, feels comfortable with such a silly conclusion. I can’t help feeling that if we could answer the question of what we want from these kids… we would suddenly see that we took a wrong turn. I have enough faith in American imagination and resourcefulness to believe that, at that point, we’d come up with a better — in fact, a whole supermarket of better ways.
The comment about “a whole supermarket of better ways” strikes me as an timely phrase, and Pagosa Springs has been heading in that direction over the past decade or two. For children in the younger grades, we have our traditional Elementary and Middle schools, plus alternatives like Pagosa Peak Open School, Pagosa Valor Academy, Our Savior Lutheran School, Pagosa Family School and various ad hoc homeschooling groups. At the high school level, we have our traditional Pagosa Springs High School, San Juan Mountain School, GOAL High School, Pagosa Valor Academy, Southwest Colorado eSchool and homeschooling options.
This increase in schooling options helps to explain why Archuleta School District enrollment has declined by 10% since 2019.
It doesn’t help explain, however, ASD’s current proposal to abandon two functioning school facilities, at a cost of $126 million.