WOODLAND PARK, Colo. — On Monday, the Woodland Park School District (WPSD) announced plans to relocate middle school students to the high school building next school year.
The merge would affect all seventh and eighth graders at Woodland Park Middle School who would move about a mile away from their previous building to Woodland Park High School.
WPSD Superintendent Ken Witt said the reason for the merge is because of growing enrollment at Merit Academy, a charter school that operates inside a portion of the middle school. According to data from the Colorado Department of Education, enrollment at Merit Academy increased by almost 32% from 331 students last school year to 436 students this school year.
Witt said the district has no other option but to move middle school students to the high school to optimize building usage.
“It's something that we have to do. We're at the point where enrollment requires that we figure out where to place students," he said.
Erin O'Connell, a parent of a seventh grader and a sophomore in the district, said she will be pulling her children out of the district because of the merge. She said her seventh-grade son has brought up concerns about being in a building with high schoolers. O'Connell said she is nervous about putting students with a large age gap together in one school.
“As an older kid you experiment with different things than a younger kid would and just the exposure itself is a little nerve-racking," she said.
She said a survey was sent to parents in November of 2022 that included a question about whether the middle school and high school should remain separate.
The results showed that 88% of responding parents wanted to keep the two schools separate.
Witt responded to the concerns, saying that middle school and high school students will be separated within the school.
"There'll be sections that are separate. So, the intermix of students is minimized except where appropriate and desired for like extracurricular activities and sports," he said.
When asked if the merge would go forward despite concerns from parents, Witt said: “Well you don't take a survey to figure out how many kids you have. You count the kids. And we don't take surveys to figure out how much square footage we have. We measure the buildings. We know that we have to make a move to accommodate enrollment.”
Witt mentioned the high school building has accommodated seventh and eighth graders before, but did not know which years or when that took place.
He said the plan is to keep middle schoolers at the high school for the foreseeable future and there are no plans to build another building.
Last year, a similar procedure took place, with all sixth graders moving into the district's three elementary schools. That move was scrutinized by students who protested the idea in March of last year.
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Witt said he expects the plan to merge the middle school and high school will be finalized in the next month.
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