Opinion: Ranchvale closing fiscally responsible for school board

Clovis Municipal Schools’ decision this week to close Ranchvale Elementary School was not difficult. Just sad.

Costs to repair a deteriorating facility were estimated in the millions of dollars, and the district has nearly 1,000 empty seats in other nearby schools.

So CMS board members unanimously made the fiscally responsible decision to shutter the 61-year-old building located 11 miles northwest of Clovis.

Ranchvale-area residents have plenty of reasons to be upset about the decision; it involves more travel time for their students and the community’s rich school history that goes back nearly 100 years will probably die.

Everyone wants to keep Ranchvale for sentimental reasons, but who wants to pay for it?

Taxpayers have paid enough already.

CMS board members and administrators have been spending taxpayer money freely for a decade — just not on Ranchvale. They’ve been anticipating growth that hasn’t materialized, which is the reason for the empty seats in some nice buildings throughout the district that have cost tens of millions of dollars since 2006.

Numbers provided by CMS Superintendent Jody Balch show the district has about 4,100 students enrolled in elementary schools that have a capacity for 5,260 — more than enough to handle the 275 kids enrolled at Ranchvale.

Plus, the overwhelming majority of Ranchvale’s students come, not from Ranchvale, but from Cannon Air Force Base.

Cannon students have neither a historical investment nor a travel issue when it comes to their elementary school choice.

Cannon students will have to go about two miles extra when they’re transferred into schools in Clovis’ city limits in August.

Cannon even issued a press release saying it supported the district’s proposal to close Ranchvale.

So that leaves just a few dozen people from the rural community who are really devastated about the demise of Ranchvale.

By themselves, they couldn’t fund the $10 million officials said is needed to build a new school.

There is no one really at CMS today who can be blamed.

Balch didn’t become superintendent until May 2014. Most of the school board members were not around in 2006 when the spending spree began.

We could blame former superintendents Terry Myers or Rhonda Seidenwurm, or former school board members, for not having the foresight to see or care about Ranchvale’s future.

But mostly we just have to blame Father Time, which also killed Grier, St. Vrain, Claud and countless other Curry County communities.

We’d love to see Ranchvale residents rally and open a private school. After all, the government’s one-size-fits-all approach to education will never be as efficient as learning that’s geared to individuals; a private school like that could attract students from Clovis and throughout the region.

But that brings us back to money.

Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Clovis Media Inc. editorial board, which includes Editor David Stevens and Publisher Rob Langrell.