RE-1 board weighs tearing down Manaugh after insurer balks at roof

The Montezuma-Cortez School District RE-1’s insurer will cover water damage inside the former Manaugh Elementary School but not the failing roof that let the water in, the district told its school board at a work session Tuesday night. The district’s maintenance staff then recommended tearing the building down. The board is expected to decide what to do with it at its Nov. 17 meeting. The Current’s preview of the work session set out the full agenda.

The work session ran four hours and 40 minutes. Besides Manaugh, the board heard from four superintendent search firms, went over improvement plans for the district and two of its schools, and got its first figures on students the district has won back with online classes. Work sessions are for discussion, and the only vote was the unanimous one to set the agenda. Six of the seven directors were there; Director Lara Maria Blair was absent.

Manaugh’s roof

The building, closed since 2022, has a hole in its roof that has been letting in water through the recent rain, the district told the board. It read out the insurer’s response: coverage extends to the resulting water damage inside the building, but not to the roof itself, because deterioration and wear and tear of the roofing system are excluded from the policy. The district said it would pay a $10,000 deductible first.

A member of the district’s maintenance staff told the board that a core sample had found water trapped between the roof deck and the insulation, which he said could corrode a metal deck or lead to mold. He said the roof could not be fixed, only patched to buy time, and that building code allows only two layers of roofing, which limits what a patch can do. One estimate given at the meeting put even a patch at more than $50,000. Asbestos is still in the building, he said, so any demolition would have to wait for testing and abatement. He said the roof’s replacement had been put off for about 10 years on the instructions of earlier administrators.

Asked what he would recommend, he said to demolish the building and either use the land for something else or sell it.

Board members questioned putting a large sum into the roof of a building the district may tear down. One asked whether simply fencing it would be cheaper, and he said trespassers are a liability and that the playground, more than 30 years old, has likely outlived its life too. He also said the district would need to check whether any grant that paid for it requires the site to stay in use. The board asked for bids on a temporary patch and for estimates of asbestos testing, abatement and demolition before Nov. 17. He said he would try to get a rough figure from an abatement company he knows, though board members doubted full demolition numbers would be ready by then.

Last month’s board packet priced a full replacement roof at $600,000, with asbestos removal estimated at about $250,000 more (the Current’s Oct. 20 meeting story).

A plan for every building

Interim Superintendent Drew Pearson then asked the board to start work on a district-wide facilities master plan, so that decisions like Manaugh’s are made against a long-term plan rather than one building at a time. He handed the board an overview of the district’s buildings, their use and their repair history, which he said he had pulled together quickly.

He pointed to a proposal from Performance Services to overhaul heating and cooling at the elementary schools, which he put in the $7 million to $10 million range, and to falling enrollment. He said each year’s class is smaller as the grades go down, into the low 100s, and that the high school was built for 725 students and enrolls in the 600s. The agenda carried the district’s July 2024 facilities report, which covered only Mesa, Kemper and Beech Street.

The questions the board would have to settle first, he said, include whether it wants a single elementary school, fewer buildings, or to keep and maintain all of them. Hiring a firm to write the plan would cost more than $15,000, the district said, so it would need a board vote. As an interim, he said, he did not know whether he would be there next year, which is why he wanted the conversation started now.

Four search firms make their pitch

The board wants a firm to recruit a permanent superintendent and is scheduled to choose one on Nov. 17, according to the interim superintendent’s October report. Six firms were listed on the agenda; four presented. NetSynk and Ray & Associates did not appear in the recording. The firms’ fees were in written proposals the board had in front of it. No fee was read aloud, and the proposals are not posted with the agenda. Each firm’s claims below are its own.

• McPherson & Jacobson. A consultant who said he lives in Pueblo and is fluent in Spanish described setting criteria with the board in November and December, meeting stakeholders in January and reviewing applications in February or March.
• JG Consulting, whose CEO, James Guerra, said the Austin, Texas-area firm has run 70 superintendent searches in 12 years, that 68% of its placements are still in their jobs, and that a search typically takes about four months. He said software the firm owns checks candidates’ claims about academic results.
• HYA (Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates). Associate Brian Ewert said he spent 13 years as superintendent of Englewood and Littleton schools. He said HYA’s fixed price includes a six-month “transition academy” for the new superintendent and a first-year evaluation, and that over the past 10 years 94% of the superintendents it placed finished their first contracts.
• Zeal Education Group. Founder Jeff Melendez said the firm would spend a full week in the community and put two bilingual former superintendents on the search team. He said it would redo the search for no added fee, apart from third-party costs and travel, if the superintendent it found left within a year.

Zeal said meeting with members of the Ute Mountain Ute community would be a priority. The board asked few questions. One director asked HYA which level of its evaluation service the fixed price covers; Ewert said the base level, and that its evaluations run from $3,000 to $10,000.

Students won back online

The district said 67 middle and high school students now take all or most of their classes online, and that 27 of them, 15 at the high school and 12 at the middle school, were not enrolled in the district last year. They came back from multi-district online schools, moved back from out of state, or re-enrolled after dropping out. Using a rough per-pupil funding figure of about $12,000, a district administrator put the recovered revenue at about $324,000, and called that an estimate.

Administrators also gave the board the cost of courses from Colorado Digital Learning Solutions. At the high school they put it at about $45,000 for 179 enrollments in courses the school does not offer, and about $28,000 for 113 enrollments in courses it already teaches in person. Administrators said that second group is where the district could rein the program in, by having students who are mainly in person take those classes from the school’s own teachers, because it cannot staff a class and also pay someone else to teach it. At the middle school they put the cost of remote electives at about $78,000, offering roughly 16 choices to about 500 students. The middle school plans to move some of those classes, including Spanish, back in person next semester, and is looking at doing the same for health, after some students struggled with them online.

The district’s preliminary Oct. 1 pupil count, attached to the agenda and still being audited, shows the high school at 609 students, up 60 from last year, and the middle school at 503, down 22. Kemper Elementary is down 47, to 293; Mesa Elementary is down 20, to 259; and Lewis-Arriola Elementary is up 10, to 125. Across the five schools that is 1,789 students against 1,808 a year ago. The count does not include Southwest Open School or Pleasant View, and it must be certified to the state by Nov. 10.

Improvement plans

Justin Schmitt, the district’s executive director of academic services, presented the district’s improvement plan. His slides show the district earned 46.8% of the points on the state’s framework, enough to be accredited with an improvement plan but 9.2 points short of the 56% needed to be fully accredited. Kemper rose from 36.4% to 55.6%. Mesa slipped to 41.8% and the middle school fell from 45.9% to 37.7%, which puts both in the state’s Priority Improvement category. Final plans go to the board for approval on Nov. 17, and the plans for Mesa and the middle school are due to the state in January.

Mesa missed the Improvement cutoff of 42.0% by two-tenths of a point. Administrators said the district had won an appeal of its own rating last year but chose not to appeal Mesa’s, because the lower rating makes the school eligible for state improvement grant money and they expect it to clear the line next year anyway. Mesa’s plan shows math proficiency rising from 13.1% to 18.8% and reading from 20.9% to 24%, and sets a target of 35% in both. It also aims to cut the share of students on READ plans, for reading well below grade level, from 46.4% to under 35%.

The middle school’s plan shows English proficiency on state tests falling from 29% to 12% last year, a drop the school’s interim principal called out of line with its history. It sets a target of 30%. The school cut class periods from 82 minutes to 53 to make room for a daily advisory period, an intervention block and “pursuits,” six-week elective projects.

Staffing, a survey and other business

Principals’ written reports and comments described hard-to-fill jobs. Amy Kynor, the middle school’s interim principal, wrote that the school has three interim administrators, three long-term substitutes in teaching jobs, and a science opening that has drawn no applicants. She told the board some science and social studies classes have 29 or 30 students.

The district went over the results of its fall Panorama surveys, which it said were answered by 603 students, 106 staff members and 133 families. Teachers’ answers on having the resources to do their jobs fell below the 10th percentile nationally. The district plans to run the surveys again in the spring. The high school’s principal cautioned that only about 6% of the school’s families responded.

The board also heard a presentation on Raising Highly Capable Kids, a 13-week parenting program from the nonprofit Resilient Kids, which Director Mike Lynch asked to bring to the board. No action was taken. The draft board handbook returns on Nov. 17. No one signed up to speak during public comment.

The district congratulated Andrew Campo, who it said is one of six educators in the country recognized this year with a Dr. William P. Foster award from the Music Education Alliance, to be presented in Chicago.

About this story

This account is written from the district’s recording of the Nov. 3 work session on its YouTube channel and from the agenda and attachments on the district’s Diligent Community portal. The transcript is automatic captioning and garbles names, so people not named in a district document are described by their role. School ratings, test results and pupil counts are taken from the documents attached to the agenda. Figures given only aloud, including the insurance deductible, the roof estimates and the online-course costs, are attributed to whoever gave them. Students are not named.