PORT ANGELES — Waning student enrollment has always fated the North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center for probation or closure, Port Angeles School Board member Sandy Long said at a meeting in which the board reviewed options.
“We have never had enough students,” Long said at the Thursday meeting.
The board took no action, discussing a recent meeting with state officials and reviewing the sparse attendance that prompted the idea of closing the school at 905 W. Ninth St.
The skills center needs at least 150 full-time equivalent (FTE) enrollment to operate, Long said. “At minimum,” board president Joshua Jones emphasized.
Last school year, the skills center had 63 FTE students, Long said.
“The skills center has to be paid for,” she said.
“My information is that the skills center has not had enough students to pay for itself since 2009.”
Because the skills center has been beloved among the community, the Port Angeles School District has not yet taken action to withdraw from the program, she said. There’s no use in attributing blame, she continued.
Inter-district agreement
The skills center has been guided by an administrative council of superintendents from five districts and Peninsula College for 15 years, Long said.
Four districts — Sequim, Cape Flattery, Crescent and Quillayute — have said they want to withdraw from the inter-district agreement.
In theory, a single district can operate the skills center on its own if it has a student population of 12,000, according to the Washington Administrative Code.
The Port Angeles School District’s enrollment falls short. In 2016, the district enrolled a total of 3,798.59 FTE students, calculated in December.
“People don’t want to hear this,” Jones said, “but the skills center should have closed years ago.”
Long echoed this sentiment.
“We’ve been beating this dead horse too many times to count,” Long said.
Low FTE numbers in skills center programs are not unique to this region, Superintendent Marc Jackson said.
It’s a statewide issue for rural districts; the skills centers located in large school districts off I-5 are enrolling the most students because the majority of those schools are located within a 16-mile radius of a skills center, he said.
Conversely, students in this area must travel further, he said.
“If this board was to honor the decision of superintendents [at Sequim, Cape Flattery, Crescent and Quillayute] and dissolve the center, OSPI (Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction) would not stand in our way,” Jackson said.
Meeting with OSPI
Jackson, Business and Operations Director David Knechtel, Career and Technical Education Director Cindy Crumb, school board Vice President Sarah Methner and Long met last week with OSPI officials to answer questions about the dissolution of the skills center.
Methner, who teleconferenced the meeting, said OSPI did not present keeping the skills center open as a viable option.
“I didn’t get the idea that this is salvageable,” Methner said.
The options discussed included closure, a two-year probation period and becoming a satellite campus of Bremerton’s skills center, West Sound Technical Skills Center.
Regarding probation, Long did not seem optimistic. “Are you really any better off two years from now than you were before?”
Crumb spoke with the director of West Sound Technical Skills Center about becoming a satellite campus.
If Bremerton district officials decided to form a satellite, they would consider all districts in the region and another one such as Sequim might be a better fit, Crumb said. The decision would be not be up to the Port Angeles district, she said.
Methner said OSPI “downplayed” the possibility of a satellite program.
The 2017-18 preliminary budget presented before the regular meeting Thursday did not include the expenses or revenue generated by the skills center.
It did include transitional costs, an estimated $2,000, that would follow the skills center’s closure.
“I’m presenting what I expect to happen,” Knechtel said.
If the skills center closes, three career and technical education (CTE) classes — cinema and TV productions, medical careers and auto collision repair — will be moved from the skills center to Port Angeles High School, Jackson said.
It would be the first skills center in all of Washington state to close, board member Cindy Kelly said.
The building, which is owned by the district and Peninsula College, could be used for a number of “great purposes,” Jackson said.
Deciding what will happen with the building, called the Lincoln Center, would follow closure.
For now, Kelly said she wants to meet with Peninsula College trustees to talk about the building before the board moves to close the center.
The board decided to delay action until they can speak with Peninsula College about potential uses for the Lincoln Center, per Kelly’s suggestion.
Long emphasized the difference between the skills center program and the Lincoln Center, in which it has been housed.
“Many people think of [the skills center] as a building. It is not; it is a program.”
If the skills center closes, the building could remain open for other programs, she said.
A public comment
During the public comment period, Richard Wade lambasted the School Board and other district officials, saying that the district prematurely laid off employees and that it had not investigated all options for keeping the skills center open.
“Give the community a chance to bring in additional resources and create a CTE learning environment that is multi-faceted rather than the one-dimension form imposed on the center since its inception,” he said.
“Please help us reverse the black sheep mentality and make the NOPSC the flagship for learning and deveopment in Clallam County.”
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Reporter Sarah Sharp can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 56650, or at ssharp@peninsula dailynews.com.
