McALLEN — School board members here discussed the future of Bonham Elementary on Monday, treating its closure as a serious possibility.
The McAllen Independent School Board has discussed the school twice in under a week; in a board workshop Friday and a regular meeting Monday.
Bonham was originally slated to be closed as part of the Facilities Education Master Plan the district approved in 2018, materials presented to the board said. That closure was paused the next year but the reasons for closing it haven’t gone away.
If closed, Bonham would join three other elementary schools McAllen ISD has shuttered in the past decade — and there’s a strong case for doing so.
A small school, Bonham would be at full capacity with 388 students. During the 2016-17 school year it had an enrollment of 316 students. That number has steadily fallen for the past several years, shrinking to 167 during the 2020-21 school year.
The campus would need 87 more students to meet the costs associated with running the school. Roof, HVAC and other facility and equipment improvements would cost about $3 million. Other improvements could cost the district anywhere from $3 million to $7 million.
“Looking at the numbers themselves, I think the declining trend is something that we took into consideration and the amount of money that it would take to get that building up to par with regard to the roof and the HVAC system and the PA system,” Superintendent J.A. Gonzalez said.
Closing Bonham would allow the district to funnel its students to other campuses experiencing enrollment issues and focus its efforts on bolstering the number of students at those schools. Enrollment is hardly a campus specific problem in McAllen ISD, although Gonzalez said the problem is more acute on the southside of town.
The number of school aged children in McAllen was 31,668 in 2010, Lisa Cavazos, director of student outreach, said. That number fell to 28,972 in 2020.
The percentage of the available students who attend school at McAllen ISD has fallen by about 11% since 2010; Cavazos said the data points to about half of the 9,660 students who are zoned for McAllen attending charter schools or other districts and the other half being homeschooled or attending private schools.
Demographic trends aren’t likely to sway in the district’s favor either, Cavazos said. Live births in the area are declining, and although the population is growing, family size is decreasing.
“Families are actually having less children,” she said.
If Bonham is shuttered Superintendent Gonzalez would meet with staff to discuss assignments and meet with parents to discuss rezoning students. Families would be invited to tour Houston and Escandon elementary schools, both of which are just a few minutes away by car.
Beginning in the 2021-22 school year Bonham students would be zoned to Escandon but be automatically transferred to Houston or any campus they choose to attend.
Out of the 31 employees currently assigned to Bonham 29 would be reassigned, nine following the campus’ students and the rest to other district vacancies; the two others have recently resigned.
Those reassignments would save the district an estimated $670,000.
A plan and a hefty financial savings doesn’t necessarily make closing the 53-year-old school an easy decision.
Cavazos described Bonham as a tight-knit school with a tradition of attendance that spans generations. Current students’ parents attended Bonham, she said, and often their grandparents attended Bonham.
“If you visit Bonham Elementary it is very much a cozy little neighborhood school,” she said. “It feels like the kind of place everybody knows everybody, and that speaks to parents, it speaks to their heart.”
That description resonated with freshman trustee Sofia M. Pena, who suggested the district find ways to bring more students to Bonham.
“I just want to make sure we’re exhausting every opportunity before we send these kids somewhere else,” she said.
Trustee Debbie Crane Aliseda also said she was opposed to closing the school. She said she felt the district has neglected southside schools, which have suffered academically.
Poorer academics makes students easy prey for charter schools and other districts, Crane Aliseda said.
“I don’t think we’re ready to throw in the towel,” she said. “I think that we need to throw everything in and help the principal there, and the students there and the staff there, and do the same thing at Escandon and do the same thing at the other C campuses — and it’s been a long time coming. And I don’t think that the answer is close the doors; I think the answer is that we go all in and fight.”
Gonzalez said Friday that the administration had considered a strategy that would revitalize and rebrand the school, and that if the board supported that idea the district could give it a shot.
“We would definitely like to explore,” he said. “Now that we know, we kind of get a sense of what our board from an oversight standpoint is thinking, we would definitely like to explore Bonham and look at other ideas. I think part of it that makes it more intriguing is the ESSER funds that are at our disposal.”
It wasn’t clear Monday exactly how the district will decide what course of action it will take. Gonzalez said when Crockett Elementary was closed in 2011 the board voted on it; when the district closed Lincoln and Navarro elementary schools he said the board did not vote.
Board President Sam Saldivar said closing the school would fall under the superintendent’s purview and not require a board vote; attorney Stephen Crane indicated a board vote may be appropriate.
Crane Aliseda said she would like a vote. Trustee Conrado Alvarado said he’d rather not.
What trustees did largely appear to agree on was the necessity to do something to remedy the situation at Bonham.
“I would love to hold onto Bonham,” Saldivar said Friday. “I hate to even have this conversation, I wish we weren’t having it, but the reality is we don’t have the pool to begin with to draw in our available children within the city of McAllen to even look at us. And it’s getting smaller and the competition is getting greater. And unless I see a definitive plan and what timeframe it would be — we’ve already been waiting three years with Bonham from the recommendation that we should have addressed it three years ago.”
