Education

A closer look at the four elementary schools Wichita plans to close in $450M bond issue

By Chance Swaim

Updated February 19, 2025 4:57 PM

Clockwise from top left: L’Ouverture Magnet School, OK Elementary, Pleasant Valley Elementary and Woodland Elementary. Travis Heying The Wichita Eagle

Editor’s note: Before voters decide on a $450 million school bond issue on Feb. 25, The Eagle is profiling many of the schools affected. Find continuing coverage of the bond issue election here.

The Wichita public school district plans to close four elementary schools as part of the master plan adopted by the school board in August 2024.

A special election to decide whether to issue $450 million in bonds to pay for the plan is scheduled for Feb. 25.

District officials say the schools — L’Ouverture, OK, Pleasant Valley and Woodland — will be closed no matter the outcome of the election.

If the bond passes, many of the students and staff from those schools would move to new buildings or schools that were built as part of the most recent bond issue in 2008.

Luke Newman, director of facilities for Wichita Public Schools, said the district and consultants chose those four schools because there’s a high concentration of small elementary schools in the northwest quadrant of the district.

“We wanted to try to right-size specific sections of town,” Newman said. “And that’s why that area where we’re closing the four schools kind of all in the same vicinity.”

A consultant study by Woolpert Inc. suggested the Wichita school district “had too many elementary schools for its population to fund each school at the level of quality desired.”

“When a district has too many schools relative to its population, it must either reduce services and staff below desired levels, operate in a deficit budget, or some combination of the two,” the study says.

“The master plan is the master plan, and we have to move forward with it, with or without a bond,” Newman said. “And so what will happen is we’ll still need to move forward with the building retirements, but we would just have to do it without the rebuilds on the other side of it.”

The bond issue came under consideration after the district abruptly closed four other elementary schools — Clark, Cleaveland, Park and Payne — and two middle schools — Hadley and Jardine — last year.

“In every single scenario where we’re closing schools, we’re moving students into better facilities,” Newman said.

Here are profiles of each of the four schools that would be torn down: