Why Our Neighborhood Public School May Close to Pay for the District’s Multi-Million Dollar Admin Building Overruns
The folding chair stuck to the back of my jeans as the district’s chief financial officer clicked to slide 17 of Tuesday night’s budget meeting. A half-crushed clay penguin my third grader Leo made in art class poked through the side of my canvas tote, and the PTA’s leftover buttered popcorn had long gone cold on the table behind me. Then the slide popped up: Proposed FY25 Budget Reduction: Close Lincoln Elementary, Annual Savings $1.2M. A guy in a construction hoodie two rows ahead leaned over to his wife and said, quiet enough only people around us could hear, “Three years. They’ve been in that fancy new admin building three goddamn years, and now we pay for it.”
Lincoln is our tiny neighborhood K-5, 220 kids total, where I walk Leo and my kindergartener Lila every morning, seven minutes from our front door. The gnarled oak tree at the sidewalk edge is a tradition: fifth graders leave acorn necklaces strung with yarn for new kindergarteners the first month of school. Rita, the office secretary, keeps a stash of dairy-free chocolate chips for Lila’s nut allergy and slips Leo a dinosaur sticker every Wednesday when he turns in his homework folder. A third of the current parents went to Lincoln themselves when they were small.
The admin building bond went on the ballot back in 2020. District leaders said the old 1960s admin office had mold in the walls, a leaking roof, and no private meeting space for special education case check-ins. They promised the $11 million price tag would come entirely from separate capital funds, that no money would be pulled from classroom operating budgets, that kids would never feel the cost. The bond passed by 127 votes. I knocked on doors for it, actually. I brought chocolate chip cookies to the phone bank. I thought we were doing the right thing.
Final construction costs came in at $14.2 million, 29% over budget. We’ve since learned the overage paid for custom granite countertops in the school board boardroom, a covered executive parking lot with six unused EV chargers, a $62,000 district rebrand that swapped the beloved old oak logo for a sleek blue swoosh no one liked, and a $120,000 no-bid construction management contract awarded to the superintendent’s college roommate. None of those line items were shared with voters before the election. Annual debt service on the overrun adds up to $1.1 million a year for the next decade. Closing Lincoln would almost exactly cover that bill.
People lined up for 90 minutes to speak at that first meeting. A mom of an autistic second grader told the board her son’s consistent paraeducator and 12-person class at Lincoln was the only reason he’d stopped having daily meltdowns at school. Sarah, a fourth grade teacher who lives two blocks from me, held up the stack of new reading intervention kits she’d received two weeks prior, for kids reading two grade levels behind, and asked where those kits were supposed to go when the doors got locked. The CFO repeated “tough budget choices” and “district-wide enrollment declines” so many times the phrase started to sound like a recording, even though our neighborhood enrollment is up 8% in three years, because young families move here specifically for Lincoln.
I walked home with Sarah after the meeting, her lesson plan binder peeking out of her bag, the corner chewed to bits by her golden retriever. She said she’d already gotten a casual email from a principal across town asking if she wanted to apply for an open spot, but she didn’t want to leave her kids. When I got in the door, the babysitter said Leo had gotten out of bed twice to listen at the top of the stairs. He was curled up on the couch in his dinosaur pajamas picking at a loose blanket thread, and he asked, quiet, “Am I not going to be in the same class as Javi next year?”
I’d been so wrapped up in anger and spreadsheets that I hadn’t stopped to think what all the floating uncertainty was doing to the kids. I sat down with Rita and our part-time school counselor Marisol last week, and they said they see the impact within 48 hours of a new closure rumor making the rounds. Office referrals for minor stuff—pushing in line, crumpling math worksheets, crying over lost crayons—jump by roughly a third. Fully potty-trained kindergarteners start having accidents. Homework completion drops 20% even though nothing has actually changed yet. When kids don’t know where they’ll go to school in six months, their brains burn through energy they’d normally spend on reading groups and recess play.
Marisol said the two most common mistakes parents make are lying to kids with a quick “don’t worry, nothing will happen” or ranting about unfair district decisions every night over dinner, which leaves kids feeling like their whole stable world is one vote away from falling apart. I tried the first line for a week, and Leo just kept sneaking more questions, because he could tell I was holding back. Now I use the script Marisol gave me, word for word: “Right now, you go to Lincoln. We don’t know what the school board will vote yet. As soon as we have real news, we will tell you, and you can ask me any question you have, any time.” It sounds boring, but it works: it doesn’t make a promise I can’t keep, and it clearly names what is still certain today.
We haven’t shifted a single small daily routine, even on weeks when the local paper runs a new closure story every other day. Taco Tuesday after school, the same walk to class, the same stop to hunt for shiny rocks by the oak tree, the same 20 minutes of reading on the couch before bed. For kids 6 to 11, those tiny repeated moments matter far more than any big speech about being tough. When your brain is still learning how to sort through uncertainty, knowing exactly what will happen between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. frees up space to actually focus on fractions instead of worrying where you’ll sit at lunch in September.
We’re not just making signs and showing up to meetings, though we do that too. Last Saturday, 12 of us sat around my kitchen table, cold coffee mugs scattered, one mom’s toddler coloring on the back of budget printouts, sorting through 400 pages of public records we requested for the admin building. That’s how we found the no-bid contract and the unreported granite charges, and the fact the district skipped the required neighborhood enrollment study before putting Lincoln on the closure list. We’re not asking for special treatment; we’re asking them to sell the empty side lot they bought next to the admin building and cut the three new six-figure administrative positions they created the year they moved in, before they shut down a school full of kids.
We also don’t pretend the vote is guaranteed to go our way. You can fight a closure and prepare for a possible loss at the same time; that doesn’t mean you’re giving up. We connected with the PTA at Washington Elementary, the school most Lincoln kids would be bused 20 minutes to, and they’ve hosted two joint park playdates for current and possible future students already. Last month, Leo and Javi spent an hour drawing a map of the potential bus route, marking which seats they’d take and which playground slide they’d try first. It turned a vague scary thing into something they could talk through, no big formal conversation required. A lot of parents have talked about pulling kids for homeschool or private school if Lincoln closes, and I get the urge, but Sarah points out transitions are 10 times easier when kids keep at least one familiar friend and trusted adult in the new building. Splitting the whole peer group makes the whole process harder for everyone.
Last week, the district announced they’re pushing the closure vote back six weeks after our records request exposed the missing enrollment study. That’s a win, but it’s not an end. The $3.2 million in overrun debt isn’t going anywhere. The granite is still polished, the EV chargers are still mostly empty, and someone will still have to balance that budget. If it’s not Lincoln this year, it might be the west side elementary next year, or district-wide cuts to art and PE.
This morning, I walked the kids to school like I always do. Leo stopped at the oak tree, dug an acorn out of his pocket, and tied a piece of red yarn around it to leave for a new kindergarten kid, just like the fifth graders did for Lila last fall. Rita waved from the front door, and Lila took off running for her classroom before I could even hug her goodbye. We don’t know if we’ll be walking this same route next September. We don’t know if Sarah’s intervention kits will stay in this closet or get boxed up for a classroom across town. But for today, the clay penguin is taped to my fridge, the acorn sits on the tree’s low branch, and the kids know exactly what we’re doing after school: tacos, then rock hunting, same as always. That’s enough for right now.
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