Goalposts Keep Moving, Numbers Keep Changing... But Still No Plan from District Leadership

The email communication on 8/26/2025 from the Lakewood City School District raises serious concerns about how building utilization is being calculated and presented. This is now at least the third time during this process (which started in August 2024 with the Elementary Planning Task Force) that the district has changed its approach to determining utilization for the elementary schools.

Originally, the district used capacity numbers based on a building’s original construction or renovation, which no longer reflect how these spaces are actually used. For example, Horace Mann was once listed with a capacity of 500 students. Recognizing changes in classroom sizes and the specialized programs offered there (programs that require lower student-to-teacher ratios), the district appropriately adjusted Horace Mann’s capacity to 395. That adjustment placed the building at 67% utilization, with a 10-year projection of 65%.

CAPACITY UPDATE RELEASED FEBRUARY 2025

NEW CAPACITY NUMBERS RELEASED 8/26/2025

Now, just a matter of months later, the district appears to have shifted its calculations yet again, resulting in the lowering of Horace Mann’s reported utilization to 53%. The district likely increased all building capacities back to their original construction numbers, and increased the maximum classroom size in the calculation to 25 students for all classes, even those requiring a much lower student-to-teacher ratio. It would seem that the primary reason for adjusting the utilization calculations is to deflate building utilization numbers so that a recommendation to close and repurpose can more easily be made. Though it is puzzling that Grant and Lincoln seem to have highest utilization yet are being targeted for potential closure and repurposing.

We note that Superintendent Niedzwiecki and certain school board members have claimed recently that the separate nonprofit Friends of Lakewood Schools (FLS) is blocking the utilization of the February 2025 enrollment study. We reached out to FLS and they provided the following statement in response: “This claim is utterly false. At no point has FLS ever demanded that an enrollment study not be utilized, much less that a new one be commissioned at additional taxpayer expense. We challenge the Superintendent and any school board members making these claims to provide receipts. They can’t. Why? The school board’s own counsel (Peter Zawadski of Weston Hurd) asked FLS counsel this very question during a meeting on June 10, 2025, asking if FLS had any objection to the use of recent enrollment studies in future analysis, to which FLS said it had no objections “data is data.” The fact that district leadership is now lying about such an easily proved fact to justify lighting another $50,000 on fire for a second enrollment study this year is everything the community needs to know about district leadership. The issue here is not the data. It’s that the district has no plan for what it is doing.”

With numbers changing this significantly from one explanation to the next, it becomes very difficult for parents and community members to place trust in the information being shared. These inconsistencies naturally raise questions: What data source is being used? What is driving these changes in percentages? And why isn’t a clear and consistent methodology being followed?

Perhaps more importantly, why are we only focusing on elementary enrollment? Omitted entirely from this picture is the rest of the district's schools. Lakewood’s seven brand-new 

elementary schools are in fact the most utilized school buildings in the district, while the high school (at 57%) and middle schools (at 63%) are significantly less utilized than Lakewood’s elementary schools.  And those schools have lost 10% enrollment over the past five years while elementary has grown 3%. Why has the school board spent no time looking at the health and challenges of the entire district, and only focused its efforts on closing an elementary school? 

The community deserves a strategic plan defining a clear vision for the future of Lakewood’s schools and a plan to achieve it. And it should go without saying, the community also deserves transparency and reliable data in a process as consequential as decisions about our publicly funded schools. Without those things, it is hard to avoid the perception that the outcome may already be predetermined, and that shifting numbers are being used to justify it.

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