The Albany County School Board voted 7 to 2 to close down the UW Lab School. It comes after the University of Wyoming sent the school district notice it had a year to vacate its campus location, citing safety and budgetary concerns.
According to reporting by WyoFile, trustees voted to shut down what’s possibly the longest consecutively-running school in Wyoming, known for its teacher training and place-based outdoor education programs. The decision came after hours of agonized conversation.
“I'm just wrestling with grief,” said Trustee Emily Seigel-Stanton, “about having this unique school in our district and all that it has to offer our students. It just feels like an irreconcilable loss. I think it has enormous benefits to our community and to our family, to our district, which is a family. I just feel so much regret about how all of this has unfolded successively. I really wish there was a way to go through all of these steps again and slow down time. I guess I'm just sitting here trying to reconcile that sense of grief and loss and regret with looking at the fiscal condition that our district is in and the uncertainties in the future.”
Ultimately, though, Stanton voted to close the school.
Trustee Cecelia Aragon made a last ditch effort to convince the board to move the Lab School into a recently vacated elementary school in Laramie.
“ We have a moral imperative to place Lab School at Beitel and then face the challenges as we get there,” Aragon said.
Chair Beth Bear said that option would cost the district a quarter of a million dollars in renovations.
“ I disagree with saying our new budget priority now is the Lab School, when we have been very clear for several years that it was teacher pay,” said Bear.
Trustee Kim Sorensen agreed. “We made a case that the building was woefully inadequate for elementary kids and now we're trying to turn it into a building that will require a quarter million dollars or more of restoration, retroactive.”
“There are only four districts in all of our 48 in Wyoming who have a lower base salary than ours,” said Trustee Janice Marshall. “We know that to recruit and retain teachers, we must have competitive salaries, and I'm mindful of that with every financial decision that we make.”
Trustee Nate Martin wasn’t confident moving the Lab School into the old elementary would solve the district’s bigger problem, anyway.
“I think if we ended up moving the K-5 portion of the current Lab School population, given our declining enrollments, we would end up with, once again, a half-full school,” Martin said.
Albany County legislators recently proposed stepping in to help save the Lab School as a Wyoming teacher training program. Bear disliked this option too.
“ It is quite simply government overreach as our legislators are not tasked with duties to open, close or move county schools,” Bear said. “That is what this board has been elected to do. It is a dangerous precedent to supersede local control, and this board has been consistent in our distaste with past legislative mandates that usurp local control on various issues, from parental rights to gun free zones.”
But the board did recognize the need to create a middle school alternative, such as the one the Lab School offered, for students who learn better in smaller classrooms.
“My biggest concern with the idea of consolidating is at the middle school level,” said Trustee Carrie Murthy. “I really just worry [about] students who felt like they would have been lost, would have slipped through the cracks, who really need that smaller environment. So that's where I'm having the most heartburn. If we were to consolidate, is there an option to still offer some sort of alternative at the middle school level?”
But no specific plans were made.
Board members also expressed an interest in bringing the kind of outdoor education and project learning that thrived at the Lab School to classrooms across the school district. These were all discussions that were tabled for the future.
In the end, all board members voted for closure except Pete Gosar and Cecelia Aragon.
In the meantime, Lab School students will finish out the year at their current location before being placed in their home boundary schools next year. The Wyoming Legislature also plans to propose solutions for the Lab School in the upcoming legislative session in January.
