Loveland school vote affects Fort Collins families

By Dan MacArthur
Fossil Creek Current

Baffling boundaries are afflicting hundreds of families south of Trilby Road who call Fort Collins home but send their children to Loveland schools.

The problem affects Thompson School District families in a number of Fort Collins neighborhoods, particularly Ridgewood Hills, located in the middle of a peninsula extending from Taft Hill to Timberline roads that juts north into the sea served by Poudre School District.

Voters in the Thompson district last year narrowly approved an $89 million bond issue to, among other capital improvement projects, finance construction of a new elementary school in the area. It is scheduled to open in 2008 on a site already set aside for that purpose on Avondale Drive, Ridgewood Hills' main thoroughfare. Thompson planning specialist Kate Browne said the school will have a 350-student capacity.

But electors by an even slimmer 117-vote margin rejected an increase, or override, of the mill levy for staffing and operating the new and existing schools. Bond issue revenues can be used only to pay for construction and physical improvements. That means the school district can afford to build the school but not operate it.

In response, the district is returning this year asking voters for authority to increase its property tax mill levy by a maximum of 4.15 mills to raise up to $4.9 million in the first year and $6.5 million annually thereafter in annual revenues. The tax would cost homeowners $33 annually on every $100,000 of their property's market value.

The money would be used to operate the new schools and additions approved in the 2006 bond election, in addition to restoring 54 teacher jobs eliminated following failure of the mill-levy override. It also would maintain advanced college preparatory classes, support literacy and literacy instruction, and provide students with current computer technology.

Aimee Foster, a Ridgewood Hills mother and volunteer for the mill-levy override campaign, said the proposal is important to area parents committed to establishing a neighborhood school. Currently students in the enclave are bussed to Loveland schools or transported by parents to Poudre schools with room to accept them. Unfortunately, Foster said, there is no capacity at the closest Poudre schools on the south end of the district.

"Many families who live here cannot get into the south Poudre schools, even though they are less than a mile away, due to overcrowding in the Poudre district," she said. "Since we are outside the district boundary, we are not priority."

Thompson is doing what it can to remedy the situation, according to Foster, by allowing area students to attend Cottonwood Plains elementary east of Highway 287. But that school also is packed and will become even more so as more new homes are built.

"Those families just are not being served," asserted Pam Howard, a member of the committee coordinating the campaign for "Yes on 3A," which supporters have dubbed the "Teachers Matter" referendum.

Foster said she fears Fort Collins residents within the Thompson district may not be aware of the issue buried at the end of a lengthy ballot and how it affects their neighborhoods.

"It's not very well known to the people out here," she said, "We're just a little pocket."

Browne said the border drawn in 1960 also places in the Thompson district students from other Fort Collins subdivisions including Greenstone, Registry Ridge, Ridgewood Hills, Provincetown and Stanton Bridge. Although there were few conflicts when the area was sparsely populated, they have increased as Fort Collins and Loveland marched toward each other. However, voters more than a decade ago rejected a ballot measure to realign the school district boundaries.