Heatherwood Educational Advisory Team begins community process to envision possible future program options

Members of the Heatherwood Educational Advisory Team were feeling hopeful, inspired, and empowered at the close of the second meeting of the group on April 29. The team is beginning a community engagement process to develop recommendations for future programming and other educational experiences to help increase Heatherwood Elementary School's enrollment in future years. The Boulder Valley School District is among numerous school districts across the country that are facing the challenges of declining enrollment.

The community engagement process was recommended by the Long Range Advisory Committee (LRAC) as a way to involve school communities in conversations about responding to declining enrollment in the district. This group of district stakeholders was created by the Board of Education in June 2022, and over the following year, LRAC developed metrics and recommendations to guide the district in responding to declining enrollment.

At the recent Heatherwood meeting, district staff explained that LRAC envisioned several possible outcomes of the community engagement process, including ideas that might come from the community. The Heatherwood team will focus specifically on one of those options - developing specialized programming that would be attractive to and meet the needs of neighborhood families. The ultimate goal is to increase and stabilize enrollment to at least two classes at each grade level to support a thriving, well-resourced school.

The team is using the Design Thinking model to develop recommendations. Design Thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. The five stages of the model are:

1. Empathize: Research the user's needs

2. Define: State the user's needs and interests

3. Ideate: Challenge assumptions and create ideas

4. Prototype: Start to create solutions

5. Test: Try your solutions out

At the meeting, the team began the Empathize stage by reviewing feedback that had already been gathered from the first public community meeting in March, through a feedback form that was sent to Heatherwood families, and from data from a district-wide community survey sent out last fall.

In the coming weeks, another survey will be sent to the neighboring community to gather more information about the interests and needs of the families of Gunbarrel. The advisory team will use this data to define user needs and eventually develop recommendations. Meetings are scheduled into September, at which point the team will make a proposal to the BVSD Board of Education for consideration.

Heatherwood Principal Genna Jaramillo summed up the process so far, saying, "After the meeting with our stakeholders, the mood was positive and members said they were hopeful."