Albertville families who open-enrolled in STMA School District see potential closure of option disastrous
by Jim Boyle
Editor
Feeling the pinch at St. Michael-Albertville High School, school district leaders there decided to explore the option of closing open enrollment at the 6-year-old senior high facility.
The mere mention of such an action has touched off a firestorm of activity by city offices in Albertville and residents in neighborhoods such as Hunter’s Pass and Towne Lakes that have helped produce 200 more elementary student transfers from the Elk River Area School District to Albertville schools during the past six years.
STMA Superintendent Jim Behle said the district has welcomed these children and families who have come for differing reasons, be it geography, parent preferences or perceptions they have of individual schools or school systems.
Families who live in Albertville have raised an issue with how school district boundary lines are situated.
He went on to say many of these students and families have come to call the Albertville community and their school, or schools, within it home.
These parents and families packed the Albertville City Council Chambers at its first meeting in May to express their concerns and their thoughts about open enrollment and the district’s boundaries.
One father spoke of an hourlong bus ride in one direction before 2 1/2 hours of schooling, followed by another hourlong ride.
Another father explained that his son is a Knight (Albertville’s mascot) through and through: “He goes to Albertville Friendly City Days. He participates in FYCC (Family Youth Community Connections in Albertville).”
Jillian Hendrickson, the mayor of Albertville, and Walter Hudson, an Albertville City Council member, were taken by the testimonies and authored a letter to the editor that ran in the Crow River News, a sister publication to the Star News and one of the publications in the ECM Publishers chain of newspapers.
They called the situations created by the district’s boundaries that place Albertville families in District 728 schools, such as Otsego and Rogers elementaries and Rogers middle and high schools, “hardly ideal.”
Talk of closing open enrollment, they say, would be dramatic for families.
“While currently enrolled students would likely be allowed to remain in attendance through graduation, the closure of open enrollment could have a profound impact on families with young children,” Hendrickson and Hudson wrote. “This potential complication for many of our residents has prompted renewed discussion of a broader issue, the boundaries of the STMA school district.”
Behle said the good news is families in this area have great schools and great choices to choose from when considering where to send their children. Decisions, however, come with pitfalls.
That an Albertville family can’t catch a bus ride in their own neighborhood to a school in their own community frustrates many.
After hearing testimony from its residents, the Albertville City Council passed a resolution to investigate the inclusion of Albertville’s northern neighborhoods in the STMA School District with the hope of facilitating a broader discussion.
Issue brewing for a long time
This issue has been brewing ever since St. Michael-Albertville High School opened in 2009. In 2010 there were 84 students from Albertville who lived in the District 728 that had open enrolled in STMA schools. In 2015, there were 284.
The number of K-12 students living in District 728 totaled 164 in 2010. By 2015 that number had risen to 425, an increase of 159 percent.
The only exodus more dramatic for Elk River schools was a 192 percent increase of District 728 students open enrolling elsewhere when Spectrum High School, a public charter school in Elk River, opened a middle school.
The number of students opened enrolled from District 728 into Kaleidoscope had risen just 20 percent.
One of the challenges for the Elk River Area School District has been an inability to bring facilities to students and families in Otsego and Albertville quickly enough.
A K-8 facility in Otsego is under construction, and land is being sought in Otsego and Albertville for more elementary school and secondary school space in the future.
Superintendent Mark Bezek reported to members of the Elk River Area School Board on May 9 that there were rumblings in Albertville about boundaries and open enrollment. He said he even got a call from the Albertville mayor.
“Even if we wanted to say ‘take our land and take our kids, even though we’re putting in a new school,’ there’s quite a process to go through,” Bezek said. “We have done a land swap with some bare land. That’s just made sense. This is a lot different.”
District 728 officials in Elk River have also been fielding calls and emails from people concerned about what is being pushed in terms of the boundaries.
While the district is losing 449 students to Kaleidoscope Charter School and St. Michael-Albertville, it still has 338 Otsego and Albertville students living in the alcove the juts into the STMA boundaries that are attending Otsego and Rogers elementary schools. The district has also been looking for land in Albertville to service future elementary populations in this area.
One month ago
About one month ago, St. Michael-Albertville school district officials decided to begin looking at what it would mean to close open enrollment at STMA High School.
St. Michael-Albertville High School has 1,772 students in a school built for 2,000. The largest classes in the district, however, are still to come.
Students in grades three through eight are among the largest classes of students in the district’s history and will easily push STMA High School past is design capacity in a few years.
“In three, four years we will be exceeding our capacity,” Behle told the Star News this past week.
He has been tasked by his board to go on a fact-finding mission. Behle said administrators are sensitive to the parents of children who have opened enrolled in their schools and have stated those who have already enrolled or applied to open enroll will be protected.
“The families that have enrolled have become part of the community in Albertville,” Behle said. “Where their children do youth activities is here. Where they go to church is here. They associate with Albertville. I understand that.”
Behle said the STMA School Board is only in the beginning stages of discussion on open enrollment and that any decisions are still a few meetings away.
Behle said he sees the issue of the school district boundaries as a separate issue, and his board, in reaction to the community, has tasked him with a fact-finding mission to see what the process involves to change school district boundaries.
He will bring that information back the board and share it with the community.
“It has always been a complicated process,” Behle said. “And it’s one thing when it involves one landowner. It’s another when it involves 300 landowners.”
Bezek told board members the city of Albertville has tried to get the land where the Albertville Outlet Mall sits. That land, where the mall sits on two sides of Wright County Road 19 and is home to some billboards, generates $537,514 annually for the Elk River Area School District, according to Wright County Assessor Tony Rasmuson.
“Now you have the Sony (theme park proposal going on out there),” Bezek said. “These are all high-ticket tax items that come our way because the lines were drawn that way.”
Members of the Elk River Area School Board spoke in favor of listening in on the discussions, but staying out of them for now.
“We don’t need to come to the table with any thing other than our listening ears on,” School Board Member Jamie Plantenberg-Selbitschka said.
Bezek and other board members were supportive of that approach.
“People want to be heard,” Bezek said.
Otsego City Council members were told May 9 at its regular meeting that a joint meeting with Albertville and the two school districts has been proposed.
Council members in Otsego decided to take a wait-and-see approach, letting the school districts make the first moves.
They discussed possible changes to the open enrollment plan for St. Michael-Albertville School District that have been talked about. Council members also discussed the city’s role in the matter and was informed by the city attorney, Andy MacArthur, that it legally could not take any action. Instead, the council could host a forum for the public to discuss school boundary lines.
The council also discussed possibly supporting Albertville, whose city government may seek action in the matter, but agreed not to take a position.
Meanwhile, supporters of a change to the school boundary lines have established a Facebook page called UnitedSTMA. Information has also been posted on the city’s website.
(Editor’s note: Nick Williams contributed to this report.)