The Aspen School District may not accept out-of-district students for the 2025-2026 academic year.
The district announced it may not conduct open enrollment for the school year because of a steady student population and looming cost-saving measures that will be implemented in the next academic year that will likely impact the amount of teachers at the school. The district will not rehire any positions it loses through attrition as a means of saving money to build up depleted reserves and increase staff salaries.
“You have a little piece of board policy which is class sizes,” ASD Superintendent Tharyn Mulberry said in a school board meeting on Wednesday. “And if we’re going to be doing some of the changes with the expense task force around class sizes and we just allow a lottery to come in without making sure, after all of our staffing cuts and all of those things are done, we won’t know or be able to predict where the bleeding will occur and what will happen.”
Parents expressed frustration with the decision and confusion over whether some circumstances that allow students outside of the district to enroll would still apply. Some said it felt like the district was being exclusive to students outside of the district’s boundaries.
But the open enrollment does not happen every year and is only meant to add students when enrollment is low, Mulberry said during the meeting. Adding students during low-enrollment years ensures the district can keep certain programming and not lay off staff.
Open enrollment began in 2020 when several families moved out of the city of Aspen boundaries. The district was anticipating losing about 170 students during the COVID-19 pandemic, a drop in enrollment that would have been catastrophic for a small district, Mulberry said. A large part of school district funding comes from the state-set amount of per-pupil funding; fewer students means less funding.
Originally, open enrollment was only available to students in grades kindergarten through fourth grade, because class sizes in those grades were much smaller than the classes graduating out of the district at the time.
“We only initiate (open enrollment) when we need to bring in students,” Mulberry said. “It is not automatic, it never has been.”
ASD is required to accept out-of-district students if there is room for them, according to state law. But the district itself determines if it has adequate space for more students by considering school board guidelines on class sizes, the capacity of the building, amount of teaching staff and more, according to the district’s admission policy.
During years when the district accepts out-of-district students, it typically accepts 45 students. Of the 45 students, only about 30 end up attending the school district, Mulberry said.
The district also rarely accepts out-of-district students at Aspen High School because its enrollment numbers have remained high. Last academic year, AHS accepted 10 out-of-district students, the first time it has done so in years, AHS Principal Sarah Strassburger told the school board.
Students who attend Aspen Community School also matriculate to AHS once they graduate, adding to higher AHS enrollment numbers. ACS is a K-8 charter school authorized through a contract with ASD.
This year’s decision may have come as a shock to parents because the district conducted last year’s open enrollment much earlier before it negotiated staff salaries in the spring, Mulberry said.
“We’re waiting to see what the attrition looks like in order for us to do this,” he said.
Enrollment numbers were also lower last year. The district lost 30 students last year, but this year gained 60 new in-district students, ASD Superintendent of Business Mary Rodino said. Most of the students enrolled well after the enrollment period, Mulberry said, some of which are children of seasonal winter employees in Aspen or in families forced to move because of the California wildfires last month.
Mulberry will examine the district’s capacity to accept out-of-district students, he said during the meeting.
“I think the (open enrollment) has really stabilized our student population, and we thought, since we were doing the attrition cuts this year, that adding students to the equation after we were up 30 this year, probably wouldn’t have been a good idea,” he said. “I’m more than willing to entertain it … and talk with our enrollment secretaries around that to see where we are with each of these classes and see what they’re thinking around logistics.”
Certain out-of-district students that enroll at ASD outside of open enrollment will still be allowed to attend the district. That includes students with siblings already enrolled at the district and students whose parents work at ASD but live outside of district boundaries.
“It breaks my heart to think that someone would feel that they were being excluded in an elitist sort of way and that we don’t value community,” said ASD board member Stacey Weiss. “I don’t want us to be seen as we’re shutting the door.”…Read more by Lucy Peterson, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
