LAMAR — Several decades ago, when Karen Hartman finished second grade, the country schoolhouse she attended in Iowa closed for good. The following year, a farmer started raising pigs in the gym.
“That was a hurt to the community,” she said.
Decades later, Hartman encountered a similar situation, and vowed to help engineer a different outcome. She was working at a school housed in a 1917 brick schoolhouse in farm fields a few miles north of Lamar, in Colorado’s southeastern corner. The Lamar School District wanted to close the school, Alta Vista Elementary.
This time, a few dozen families stopped the closure and built something stronger.
“I just had a strong conviction to keep something that was very good for the community,” Hartman said.
In 1998, those families converted Alta Vista from a district school into a public charter school. The authorizer was Lamar School District RE-2, the same district that had planned to shut it.
Today Alta Vista Charter School enrolls 131 students from kindergarten through sixth grade, more than double its enrollment at conversion.
Alta Vista’s conversion history may be bordering on ancient, but it now holds potential relevance for communities across Colorado. Enrollment is falling across much of the state, a fact that invariably will lead to school closures and consolidations. Small rural schools are often especially vulnerable in such circumstances.
What lessons can groups of families, nonprofits and charter school advocates learn from Alta Vista’s seamless, nearly frictionless conversion to a charter school? At least some of those lessons could be applicable elsewhere,
Every year, the same question
Hartman started working at Alta Vista in 1988 as a paraprofessional, secretary, and technology aide. The school was small and living on borrowed time. “The district was telling us if you get below 45 kids, we’re going to close you,” she said.
Staff and families responded by adding a kindergarten and bringing back the fifth grade, which the district had moved to the elementary school in town. Enrollment climbed into the 60s. Even so, Hartman said, some people in town believed the country school was taking money from the town schools, although all of them belonged to the same district. “It was a feeling that we were stealing their money,” she said.
The closure threat was a perennial worry. “Every year was the same thing,” Hartman said. “Are they going to keep us open, or are they going to close us?”
In 1996, the district began planning to reorganize its elementary schools by grade level. That would have spelled the end for Alta Vista. “It was on the board agenda that we were gone,” she said.
“Too good not to do”
Alta Vista parents looked at their options, including magnet schools and charter schools, which at the time were still new in Colorado. They found Jim Griffin, then president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools, who guided them through the process.
As the parents learned more, Hartman said, their goal grew. “We realized there was more than just saving our school, but it was to make a better school,” she said. A charter could choose its own curriculum, and the group chose Core Knowledge, which lays out a detailed grade-by-grade sequence of history, science and literature.
At that point, Hartman said, the district tried to reverse course. “They said we’ll leave you alone. We won’t try to close you,’” she said. “And we said, ‘No, this is too good not to do.’”
Hartman said 20 to 25 people were deeply involved, most of them from the surrounding farms. They included teachers, a college instructor who helped design the curriculum, and a retired administrator from the regional Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, who ran the school in its first year. Darla Specht, a local lawyer whose children attended Alta Vista, helped write the charter contract and volunteered her time for years.
The work load was heavy. “A lot of late night organizational meetings that lasted till 12, 1 o’clock in the morning,” Hartman said. “If we’d had any idea how much work that was going to be, we maybe wouldn’t have.”
The result was a proposal that stuffed a large three-ring binder, still kept in a drawer in the school office. It included a detailed plan, a budget, letters of support, and pages of supporters’ names. Leafing through it, school Principal Talara Coen said the signers were “pillars of the community. People who had raised great kids.”
The district resisted the conversion, but ultimately bowed to community pressure. “The group did such a great job of putting it together and presenting it that it was almost impossible to say no, “ Hartman said.
Coen, who arrived two years later, said the district may also have had a practical reason to agree. If Alta Vista had closed, Lamar might have lost 60 or 70 students to small neighboring districts such as Wiley, Granada and McClave. “That might have been the threat,” she said.
Hartman’s advice to other communities is to be ready before going public. “You’ve got to have all your ducks in order before you go to your board,” she said. “You can’t come with a plan that’s not well established.”
A school psychologist takes the job
Alta Vista opened as a charter with about 60 students and four teachers in combined-grade classrooms. Three administrators came and went in its first two or three years. Then, in July 2000, the board hired Coen, a school psychologist with the Lamar-area BOCES who had grown up just across the state line in Kansas.
Coen had never taught or run a school. The school’s board offered to pay fees for Coen to get a principal’s license, and asked in return that she commit to at least a three-year tenure. “So 26 years later, I’m still here,” she said.
Money was tight. Coen said the school had 67 students and about $120,000 in reserves when she arrived. At the time, the district kept 20 percent of the school’s per-pupil funding, the state money that follows each student. By law, charters now keep 95 percent.
Federal startup grants helped. Coen had never written a grant, but she wrote one after another.
Skunks, modulars, and a hardship letter
For more than a decade after the conversion, Alta Vista squeezed into the old brick schoolhouse and a set of donated modular classrooms. The modulars had no plumbing, so children crossed the playground in any weather to reach a bathroom. A skunk had been crushed under one unit, and staff ran ozone machines to mask the smell.
“I look back and think, I don’t know how we did it,” Coen said.
The school raised money for years toward building a gym. Then Coen attended a Colorado League of Charter Schools conference session on Building Excellent Schools Today, or BEST, a then-new state program that pays for school construction and renovation. “I was sitting there thinking, we are the poster child for this,” she said. She wrote a hardship letter and won one of the program’s first grants, worth more than $5 million.
The district had to sign off on the application, and Coen said it initially signaled that it would not. District officials worried we were going to draw more kids.” So Alta Vista families packed the boardroom again. “There was standing room only, and people were even outside,” Coen said. The board approved it.
Contractors gutted the 1917 building and reopened its original front entrance, which had been cemented over. BEST pays only to replace space a school already has, so it would not cover a gym. Instead, Coen went to Southeast Colorado Philanthropy Days in La Junta, met the Gates Family Foundation and came away with a $360,,000 for the gym project The local match, about $247,000, came from school funds and roughly ten years of parent fundraising.
Students moved into the renovated school, with its capacious gym, in 2011.
Inside the district’s circle
The relationship with the district took years to build. “It wasn’t good when I started, but it got better,” Coen said.
The superintendent at the time of the conversion “probably was not super onboard about the whole thing,” she said. But Coen said he encouraged his board to accept the charter, and he mentored her as a new principal.
Today Alta Vista buys back most of its central services from the district, which means it pays the district for transportation, nursing, maintenance, technology and meals. It pays more than $200,000 a year for those services, according to a presentation the school gave the district board in June.
The school also won a highly unusual 30-year charter contract, which Coen said it needed to seek financing for a gym. “We thought, oh, that’s forever, and we won’t have to worry about anything,” Hartman said. According to the school, the contract comes up for renewal in 2035.
Coen now sits with the district’s principals at their weekly meeting and serves on the district accountability committee. She has helped interview superintendent candidates, and she uses that role to ask about charters. “How do you plan to keep this excellent relationship? What are your thoughts on charter schools?” she said. Three current district board members have had children at Alta Vista.
Who attends Alta Vista now
Alta Vista is no longer mainly a farm school. Coen said only about 10 students live in the surrounding countryside, and the rest come from Lamar. Most parents drive their children out each day.
The student body also differs from the district’s. According to state data, 43 percent of Alta Vista’s students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch last school year, a common measure of family poverty. The figure was 74 percent districtwide and 45 percent statewide. The gap with the district has widened by about half since 2011, because the district’s rate climbed while Alta Vista’s stayed in roughly the same range.
Alta Vista admits students first come, first served. Families file letters of intent to enroll, and some do so when their children are infants. Hartman said the charge, common in the charter school world, that the school cherry-picks its students is false.
But she said the commitment it takes to enroll does shape who comes. “They have to be looking for options and they have to be willing to transport,” she said. “That’s the people that you attract.”
Parents are expected to do more than drive. The charter itself asks, but does not require, that families volunteer four hours per week. Many do.
Coen cited parent involvement as a major factor in the school’s success. Hartman said the school’s staff shares responsibility for every child. “That’s not your student. That’s our student,” she said. “That child belongs to the whole staff.”
Something must be working: Coes said the last three Lamar High School valedictorians have been Alta Vista graduates.
Lori Blacker, a part-time music teacher whose children attended Alta Vista said the school’s atmosphere is homey. “It’s always been a family type school, she said “Families in the area, farm families initially, gave it that different, family ethic. We have parents in the building all the time, so it really is still very much a family school.”
The next test
Hiring has become hard. This year Coen had five teacher openings on a staff of 20. She and her vice principal spent the summer calling colleges in Kansas, Nebraska and Texas. “I’ve been to numerous job fairs. They don’t even know where Lamar is,” Coen said.
Two years ago the board added a vice principal, Jennifer Lubbers, a veteran Alta Vista teacher, and Coen said she hopes Lubbers will succeed her. “She’s been training with me the last two years,” Coen said. “We do everything together now.”
Hartman retired as secretary last spring, but on the day of a recent visit she was back as a substitute. It was her birthday, and a staff member brought homemade peach cobbler to the teacher’s lounge.
The Iowa school of Hartman’s childhood is gone. “It’s leveled. You can’t even find it,” Hartman said. Alta Vista’s brick front still faces the fields north of Lamar.
“When you have a good thing going,” she said, “why would you not want to keep it going?”
Policy changes that could make conversions easier
Make exclusive chartering authority a privilege, not the default. Under current law, a Colorado district holds exclusive authority to approve charters within its boundaries unless it loses that authority, typically through a pattern of unjustified denials. Reversing the default, so that districts must earn exclusive authority and periodically re-earn it, would give conversion groups a credible alternative in the Charter School Institute, the independent, statewide authorizer. The Colorado League of Charter Schools has pushed for that change. Even a group that ultimately stays with its home district, as Alta Vista did, would negotiate from a stronger position with a second option available.
Create a formal conversion pathway tied to school closures. When a district board votes to close a school, state law could give parents and staff a defined window to submit a conversion application before the building is sold or repurposed. Alta Vista’s organizers spent roughly a year preparing theirs. A standard timeline and application template from CDE would spare each community from inventing the process in late-night meetings.
Give conversion charters first claim on the building. A conversion only works if the school stays where it is. When a district closes a school and approves its conversion, the district could be required to lease the building to the charter at nominal cost for as long as the charter operates a school there.
Fund legal and planning help for rural founders. Alta Vista’s conversion rested on a lawyer who volunteered for years, and Coen said good legal counsel should be any group’s first priority. A state or philanthropic fund for legal and planning help, available to parent groups whose school faces closure, would make that help less a matter of who happens to live in town.
