Local schools are flying drones through the hallways, cueing up video footage from previous school years and enlisting students as they create virtual tour videos and host virtual open houses to spotlight their schools during open enrollment season.
St. Vrain Valley and Boulder Valley schools switched to remote-only learning in November as coronavirus cases surged, about the same time that families, in a normal year, would start visiting schools to decide if they wanted to enroll in a school outside their neighborhood attendance area.
That meant schools had to get creative in highlighting their schools. For parents, they’re making decisions without in-person visits and while still trying to navigate the current year as schools rotate through in-person, hybrid and remote learning options in response to changing coronavirus case numbers, guidelines and recommendations.
“It’s completely unknown territory for all of us,” said Boulder Technical Education Center Principal Arlie Huffman.
So far, Boulder Valley is seeing fewer families request to open enroll. As of Dec. 15, the district had received 1,728 applications, down from about 2,205 at the same time the previous school year. The district’s open enrollment window closes Jan. 6.
While parents can continue to request open enrollment after that date, the priority goes to those who meet the deadline — and is the only shot at getting into schools that typically have long wait lists or limited space. For applications received by the deadline, the district uses a lottery system when there are more requests than seats available.
Boulder Valley received a total of 5,461 open enrollment applications last school year for this fall, according to Student Enrollment Director Mike Wilcox. Of those applications, 2,605 students received an offer to attend their first choice school and 1,289 for a second or third choice. Another 1,567 applicants were not offered any spots. Priority generally is given to in-district students and siblings.
The most requested schools were Lafayette’s Peak to Peak Charter School with 1,653 applications, Boulder’s Fairview High School with 503 and Broomfield High School with 398. At Fairview and Broomfield, about 40% of the students typically have open enrolled.
St. Vrain Valley’s official open enrollment window was from Dec. 1 to Dec. 15. District spokeswoman Kerri McDermid said the deadline helps schools plan for the upcoming year, but open enrollment will continue to be available as long as a school has space.
“In most cases, we are able to accommodate all open enrollment requests, even if they are received after the deadline,” she said.
Families open enroll in large numbers in both districts, mainly in transition years: kindergarten, sixth grade and ninth grade.
In St. Vrain Valley this fall, 45% of students were attending schools outside their neighborhood attendance areas, most through open enrollment from within and outside the school district. That percentage also includes students placed by the district in specific programs and homeless students.
In Boulder Valley last school year, 32% of elementary students, 33% of middle school students and 35% of high school students were open enrolled, both from within and outside the school district.
Open enrollment from outside the district in past years also has bolstered the district’s overall enrollment numbers, which were starting to trend down before the pandemic, and kept schools that would otherwise be under-enrolled at higher enrollment levels.
This open enrollment season, principals, especially at elementary schools, are waiting to see if their enrollment numbers rebound for the fall after many preschool and kindergarten families opted out of school during the pandemic.
In St. Vrain Valley, enrollment declined by 1,543 students, a 4.7% drop, according to the Colorado Department of Education. Preschool and kindergarten students made up the majority of the district’s decline.
For this open enrollment season, many of St. Vrain Valley’s schools have replaced their in-person tours with videos of virtual tours.
Kerin McClure, principal at Longmont’s Timberline PK-8, created a video that featured students and staff members who switched between English and Spanish. Subtitles help those who aren’t bilingual follow along. The video also highlights the school’s STEM offerings, community partnerships and connections between older and younger students.
“We tried to show a really well rounded view of what Timberline can offer,” she said. “We wanted it to really be solid around who we are as a school. It’s something we can continue to use in the future.”
Erick Finnestead, principal at Longmont’s Silver Creek High School, said he would typically see 300 to 500 people at an open house night, with about 100 students open enrolling into the school each year.
“I’ll be interested to see where our enrollments end up,” he said.
To reach students directly this school year, the school set up virtual conversations with counselors for incoming eighth graders.
For prospective parents, there’s an overview video plus videos and slideshows on specific programs, including a 40-minute video detailing what the school offers and a tour of the building. Those offerings include a Leadership Academy and a new Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-TECH, cybersecurity program.
“We tried to give a strong feel for what we offer here,” Finnestead said.
Boulder Valley’s enrollment this fall declined by 1,760 students, a 5.6% drop, according to the Colorado Department of Education. The biggest loss was at kindergarten, which declined by 371 students, a loss of about 20%.
Erie’s Meadowlark PK-8, which opened in the fall of 2017, generally hasn’t had spots available for elementary open enrollment, until now. So Principal Brent Caldwell set up two virtual open houses, one for preschool and kindergarten and one for the rest of the grades, using a drone to give a view of the school’s innovative building design.
Five families attended the first-through-eighth grade open house, while just one mom — who already has two children at the school, but had specific kindergarten questions — showed up for the preschool and kindergarten open house. The school is projected to have 75 kindergarten students next school year.
“We tend to get a bunch of families who are looking at their options in Erie, but enrollment is in such chaos this year,” Caldwell said. “My gut feeling is families are waiting to evaluate how safe it’s going to be.”
He said he’s hopeful comfort levels will increase after the holidays and as more people receive a vaccine and is planning another event for kindergarten families in April.
“That’s when we are expecting families to start to think about next year in school,” he said.
At least one local charter school, Twin Peaks Academy in Longmont, was an exception to the virtual tour trend, offering small in-person tours to prospective families.
The K-12 school has provided full-time, in-person classes to elementary students since the school year started, as well as in-person classes for middle and high school students on a hybrid schedule.
The in-person option gave Twin Peaks, which relies solely on open enrollment as a charter school, an enrollment boost this fall. The school gained 80 more students than the previous school year. In past years, Twin Peaks’ enrollment had been declining.
Eliza Mason, who has an incoming kindergartner, started looking into schools two years ago. She narrowed her top two choices to Twin Peaks Charter and Longmont’s Central Elementary. And because she started early, she had already toured both schools before schools closed in March as coronavirus cases emerged in Boulder County.
She applied to both in November, was accepted to both and chose Twin Peaks. How the school has handled learning during a pandemic didn’t factor into the decision, she said. Instead, she liked the school’s cursive and Latin classes, its uniform requirement and the limited use of technology, especially for the youngest students.
“It seems the other schools all had a medium to large screen presence, even in kinder,” she said. “I also have three children, so it is appealing to me to have one school drop off since it is K through 12.”
Boulder parent Amanda Seyle Jones is going through the open enrollment process for the first time. Her son, Abram, receives support from an intensive special education program and is starting ninth grade in the fall.
He splits his time between two households, so, like other students living in dual households, has two neighborhood schools as options. He also currently attends a Boulder middle school, Southern Hills, outside of his neighborhood because it offered the special education services he needed. And, unlike middle schools, all the district’s comprehensive high schools offer intensive special education program.
Given all those factors, Seyle Jones said, it made sense to look into open enrollment for high school. Her main goal, along with not choosing a school too far from Boulder and Louisville where he resides, is “to find a school with activities that Abram can really engage in so he can have meaningful connections with peers.”
She said the virtual tour experience did make it a “little tough” to evaluate the culture at each school.
“That’s hard to understand without talking to students and seeing school in action,” she said. “But we did seek out and talk with several teachers and parents at several schools. We got a lot of good information that way.”
She said she’s still undecided if she will apply for an open enrollment spot at Fairview High, the feeder school for Southern Hills. She’s also still considering his two neighborhood schools, Boulder High and Monarch High.
At the secondary level, principals said, the inability to offer student tours and shadowing has been a challenge. So has the lack of students using the building after schools moved to remote classes. Even when classes were in session, coronavirus restrictions meant they looked very different than in a typical year.
Gabi Renteria, principal at Boulder’s Casey Middle School, had two daytime open houses and one evening event, all through Google Meet. She included photos of the new, innovative spaces that were added as part of the district’s capital construction bond issue, as well as videos from prior years.
“We have some beautiful spaces that we haven’t really been able to take advantage of this year,” she said. “It’s hard to show people what has been happening and how our teachers interact with our kids, even though there are amazing things happening. Right now, it’s just so different.”
At the Boulder Technical Education Center, where students enroll in specialized programs while attending core classes at their home high school, Huffman asked teachers to make short videos advertising their classes. Students, one from each program, also made videos from their perspective to share with other schools.
“A huge thing we’re missing this year is the eighth-grade tours,” Huffman said. “We’re using the student videos for a presentation for the middle school counselors. It’s not the same, but it’s something.”
He added that his biggest concern is there are fewer opportunities for students to talk up the program to their classmates.
“Student word of mouth is our No. 1 marketing tool,” he said. “But this year’s students only had seven weeks of hybrid classes. They’ve gotten to experience it some, but not what it normally is. The students usually talk about what they’re doing with their friends. I strongly suspect a lot of those conversations aren’t happening.”
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