Closing Harrison’s Public Pre-K Would Be a Costly Mistake for Lakewood Families

Harrison Elementary

The district’s latest push for a centralized Pre-K building actually proves the opposite point: families deeply value neighborhood PreK sites, especially at Harrison Elementary. Consolidating into one building would hit Harrison families hard, as many Pre-K students at Harrison live near the school, particularly those in and around Birdtown who may be enrolling in Pre-K as soon as next year.

This is just the newest example of the administration reshaping data to fit their preferred outcome, which is closing and repurposing an elementary school. Ahead of the heavily controlled format of the “Community Table Top” session on Monday, Sept. 29 at Lakewood High School, the Superintendent has once again presented numbers in a misleading way that makes her goal clear.

One talking point expected at the 9/29 meeting is:

“In total, 101 of 180 preschoolers attend a preschool that is not at their home school.”

The implication is that families don’t value neighborhood PreK, a shortsighted view that ultimately undermines the district’s own goals. There are many flaws with the above logic.

Flaw #1: Currently, roughly 20+ Pre-K students live in the Roosevelt zone. Roosevelt doesn’t offer Pre-K, so these families have no option to attend their “home school” for Pre-K.

Flaw #2: Some Pre-K sites provide unique programs or services, and families naturally prefer to keep siblings together. Grant, for instance, houses the district’s gifted program, so families often place younger siblings there. The same is true at Horace Mann with the CHAMPS program. For many parents, keeping children in one building when possible simply makes life easier.

Flaw #3: Not every Pre-K site offers the same service. Taft offers full day Pre-K with before and after care available and is the only site to do so. Emerson and Grant offer all-day Pre-K. Harrison, Hayes, Horace Mann and Lincoln offer half-day programs. So, a family near Hayes Elementary looking for full day Pre-K would not select Hayes for Pre-K, because the services they need are not offered. Likewise, a family looking for half day Pre-K would only choose between buildings with half-day programs available. 

The reality is that multiple Pre-K options across the city are a strength, not a weakness. Families benefit when the district offers choices close to home or aligned with their older children’s schools. A centralized model would eliminate that flexibility and erase the neighborhood Pre-K experience for almost everyone. Not to mention, there is no bus service for general education student in our walkable school system so families will be driving to get to a centralized Pre-K, which will lead to them also needing to drive their older kids to their separate buildings. The walkable history we cherish? Poof, gone.

Harrison families would bear the greatest burden. Preserve Lakewood Schools mapped student addresses using district data, and the results were clear: most Harrison Pre-K children live nearby. If Harrison’s Pre-K were closed, those families would be forced to travel to Grant or Lincoln, 2–4 times farther and far less walkable.

Locations of Harrison Elementary Pre-K Students (*Ref 1)

Orange dots represent location of Harrison Pre-K Students. As you can see, many are within walking distance of the school and this would be greatly disrupted if Harrison Pre-K goes away in favor of a centralized facility without transportation for general education students.

It’s also worth noting that in February 2025, during a meeting with local Lakewood childcare providers, the district itself flagged key “Opportunities of Further Learning,” including:

• “Further study of community needs for all-day/year-round Pre-K should be considered.”

Closing a neighborhood school to force a centralized Pre-K building, without first studying community needs and affordability, would be reckless. The district has also not completed an analysis of maintaining and expanding Pre-K in the current elementary school buildings. They simply mention reasons like ‘too much paperwork’ as justification for not being able to do it.

Families near Harrison, and across Lakewood, have made clear that they value neighborhood Pre-K just as much as neighborhood elementary schools. The district needs to listen before making an irreversible mistake. Their proposed solution to close and consolidate isn’t right for Lakewood. The better option is to get the word out that Lakewood is home to one of the nation’s most walkable neighborhood school districts, and grow the already stable elementary enrollment.

* Ref 1: Data source is the same data the school district provided to FutureThink for the purposes of compiling maps and data for the district. On September 10, 2025 Preserve Lakewood Schools asked the district for a refresh of this data, but as of this writing it was not provided. We don’t anticipate much change with refreshed data for Harrison Elementary School Pre-K.

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