Casper-area elementary parents and students will have one less school option in the 2027-28 school year.
Natrona County School District No. 1’s Board of Trustees voted 6-3 Monday night to close Pineview Elementary School at the end of the 2026-27 school year.
The vote came after two people pleaded with the board Monday and more than a dozen more at the district’s Oct. 26 meeting to reconsider the decision. They recounted the elementary’s awards, including a teacher who was named Wyoming Teacher of the Year in 2025, National ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) Distinguished School status, student progress and more.
Infrastructure and Planning Committee Chair Thea True-Wells reviewed the committee reasoning for recommending the closure of the elementary Monday. She said she listened again to comments from Oct. 26, read all the emails the board received, and said the bottom line still was finances related to enrollment and facility improvements.
“I am not one to kick the can down the road,” she said. “I hate that about politics and public responsibilities. I am convinced that it actually makes the issue worse. … If we do nothing, we will need to have a reduction in force in two summers.”
The district began this school year without Bar Nunn Elementary and Woods Learning Center after votes last school year to close those facilities.
With the closure, staff from Pineview would be slotted into openings created through “normal attrition” such as retirements and staff leaving the district for other opportunities, she said.
Those joining True-Wells in voting for the closure were Board Chair Kevin Christopherson, Vice Chair Dana Howie, Treasurer Kyla Alvey, and trustees John Bolender and Michael Stedillie.
Voting against the closure were trustees Jennifer Hopkins, Alex Petrino, and Mary Schmidt.
A Parent’s Plea
Before the vote, parent Georgia Smith told the board that her autistic son was nonverbal when he started at the school and now is able to speak. She asked trustees to consider the staff’s proven value in educating and improving students’ lives and to keep students such as her son in a familiar environment where he is flourishing.
“You may see a building that is operating at 54% capacity,” she said. “I see a school where my son found his voice. Yes, Pineview needs financial investment, but before closing it, have we fully considered renovations, phased repairs, and reallocating funds? Trustees, our children are not numbers on a spreadsheet. They are individuals with hopes, dreams, challenges, and futures.”
School district resident Russ Harbour asked the board if it had considered transferring the teachers and administration at the elementary as a team to another building to allow parents and children to continue those relationships built over the years.
He said the district should have brought parents into the decision-making process.
“I think if you’d had the kids’ interest in your main view, you would have had those parents bring their comments forward and you could have arranged a way where those classrooms could have been transferred to another school,” Harbour said.
Pineview teacher Renee Arner told the board at its Oct. 26 meeting that she had taught at the school for seven years and it didn’t seem long ago that she was before the board with her “amazing principal” and colleagues being nationally recognized as a “distinguished school.”
“Now, I am here to plead with you to not close us down,” she said. “We have met or exceeded state expectations for three consecutive years.”
She said the elementary also houses the district’s only gifted and talented program and is a “full-inclusion school” where she has witnessed a non-verbal student use his communication device to connect with peers and participate in grade-level math.
Arner said staff have spent “countless hours” creating their learning environment. Closing the school “risks dismantling something that is truly working.”
Declining Enrollment
The Infrastructure and Planning Committee cited declining enrollment in the district overall and facility-improvement needs as reasons for closing Pineview.
The district has experienced a reduction of 1,756 students districtwide during the past five years in grades K-5. Pineview Elementary is at 54% capacity with 172 students this year.
The committee cited HVAC, plumbing, electrical, structure, roof, and site-improvement needs that would require significant investment in the building should the elementary remain open.
With the closure, the district would save $1.1 million annually, according to its estimates.
Trustees who opposed the closure said they believed the district was acting too hastily.
Petrino said she has spent time reviewing “peer-reviewed research” on school closures “and the findings raise some significant concerns about our process here.”
She said trustees had discussed taking a conservative approach to avoid drastic changes during the budget-planning process and legislative recalibration of school funding. The funding process has not even been in place for a year and already the district is moving to close the school, Petrino said.
“I would like to give the legislature an opportunity this spring to revisit the instructional silo and consider adjustments that provide districts more flexibility with staffing and funding,” she said.
Schmidt said she was voting against the closure because the process the superintendent uses to determine which school to close is not a public process. Despite comments and feedback from the closures announced last year that led to the closing of two schools this year, nothing has changed in the process, she said.
Additionally, financial information projecting the need to close Midwest grades 6-12 was shown to be inaccurate at that school and created a “doubt over the validity” of the numbers and needs being cited to close Pineview, Schmidt said.
Schmidt also said families need to be more involved in the process.
Better To Wait
Hopkins said she was voting against the closure because as with other issues the decision seemed already locked in before coming to the board for review.
“I believe the community would be better served by allowing the incoming board to start the process from the beginning,” she said.
Stedillie defended his vote and said none of the board members want to close the school, but the district operates under the “merciless thumb of dollars and cents.”
“We were faced with the hard facts of reality, and we chose to vote accordingly,” he said.
True-Wells said bailing out the elementary with one-time funding would further hurt the district in the following years and could lead to closing the school anyway.
Christopherson had no comment after his vote, but he made his feelings known at the beginning of the public comment period.
“We appreciate all the email we have received. We’ve read them all,” he said. “This is a very difficult decision for everyone on the board and I hope you give us a little bit of credit for that. Nobody wants to be making a decision either way tonight. It’s tough, but that’s what we signed up for.”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
