McMillan Elementary can serve 475 students, but just 171 students attend the school today.
Enrollment has fallen by 62% since 2014. Class sizes are much smaller than the average across the West Ada School District. Some grade levels only have one class. Taxpayers are subsidizing the cost of heating and cooling empty rooms. The building needs $5.4 million in repairs and updates within 10 years.
These are some of the facts that school district staff presented at a school board meeting Monday night to a crowd of parents and community members who are fighting to keep the school open. The school board will make a decision in November to decommission the school or keep it open.
David Reinhart, the district’s chief operating officer, said the district built several schools close together on the eastern portion of the district back in the ’70s and ’80s when the population was surging. Schools like McMillian were full for many years. But now the school is 36% full and is projected to continue to decline to 121 students in 2031.
“The situation we find ourselves in this eastern portion of our district is that something has to shift no matter what when we have a shrinking population and so many schools in one particular corner,” Reinhart said. “This is really at the heart of the matter.”
Nineteen parents, students and community members spoke during the public input portion of the meeting. All opposed closing the school.
Paige Wilson, a mother of three McMillan students, started a petition on Change.org to keep the school open. It has 609 signatures. She told trustees on Monday that her daughter struggled at an overcrowded district but has since caught up at McMillan.
“We all know McMillan Elementary cares about their students,” Wilson said. “The question is, does the West West Ada School District care about the students?”
In an interview after the meeting, Wilson told EdNews she would like the district to change school boundaries and keep McMillan open.
“This school, because of the small class sizes, the kids are getting a better education,” Wilson said.
During the meeting, trustee Rene Ozuna said class sizes are “extremely low” compared with other schools.
“I love that for all of your students and the staff members at this school, but I have to be real about what that looks like for others,” Ozuna said.
Wilson told EdNews she’s walked the neighborhoods around McMillan and talked to people who are selling their homes to young families. She expects the area will turnover slowly over time with more families with kids.
But that’s not what the district is projecting.
Miranda Carson, the district’s director of planning and transportation, said the district continually and carefully weighs two metrics to project enrollment.
First, the district partners closely with land use agencies to stay aware of incoming developments. She said there is some infill development planned around McMillan, but it might be six new units. Some of those could be one-bedroom apartments.
Second, the district calculates mobility to gauge how many students are moving into an area, even if there isn’t new growth.
“We look at several factors and for 2026, for example, our projections were 99% accurate for K-5 enrollment,” Carson said. “The model shows that we can expect a continual decline in the McMillan boundary.”
Carson and Reinhart fielded some of the frequently asked questions the district received at two public input meetings. One of those questions: Where will the students go?
Six nearby schools have 1,016 seats available, Carson said, providing “ample seats” to house the 171 students at McMillan. For example, Andrus Elementary has 270 seats available and Frontier Elementary has 263.
A long-range planning committee, made up of parents, recommended closing McMillan. Carson said that isn’t a strictly financial decision. She said the committee saw added educational value by having more than one class per grade level.
“Imagine you’re at a school and you’re the only second grade teacher,” Carson said. “You don’t have another second grade teacher to collaborate with. Having that additional collaboration is something that the long-range planning committee saw strong value to increase the education to students.”
Another frequently asked question is what could happen after the school is decommissioned. Reinhart said the district has no plans for the property.
“Should you decide to decommission it, that would be one of our many next jobs to do, and as it would be very important as it is a large part of the community,” he told trustees.
Enrollment decline, school closures a nationwide trend
For many school districts around the country, there are too many schools for the number of kids they’ll serve in the coming years, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University at an Education Writers Association conference in June.
Most of the declining enrollment throughout the country is due to lower birth rates. Districts often have smaller incoming kindergarten classes than graduating senior classes.
“When a group of high schoolers graduates and gets replaced with another group that has been affected by these birth rate declines, you can see the enrollment will just come down, down, down on average across the district,” Roza said.
State enrollment data shows West Ada last school year had 2,210 kindergarten students and 3,468 high school seniors. Statewide, all public school districts and charters last year enrolled 20,173 kindergarteners and 25,371 seniors.
Roza said some parents may feel school districts are being mean by proposing closures, but it’s not an option to go back to the way things were.
“We have this misalignment and it’s making it really painful for districts,” Roza said.
West Ada trustees will make a final decision on whether to decommission McMillan on Nov. 9.
