TUSD adds Collier Elementary to list of potential closures; Students would attend Bloom

Marguerite L. Collier Elementary School could close next year, with its students reassigned to Clara Ferrin Bloom Elementary, Tucson Unified School District officials said.

Friday’s announcement by Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo is the fifth school that TUSD has said is up for closure as part of its plans to consolidate sites as it faces dropping enrollments and budget limitations.

Students at Collier, 3900 N. Bear Canyon Rd., would move to Bloom, about four miles away at 8310 E. Pima St., at the start of the next school year, if the list is approved by the TUSD Governing Board. There is about a nine-minute drive between the Northeast Side school, just south of Snyder Road, and the East Side campus that’s between Pantano Road and North Camino Seco.

Each day this week, TUSD has announced a school that could close, along with the new school students would attend.

The district plans to host a press conference on Tuesday.

Other schools on the list of potential closures include Hudlow Elementary School, Alice F. Dunham Elementary School, Gertrude Cragin Elementary School and Joseph W. Magee Middle School.

The Governing Board is expected to vote to approve or reject Trujillo’s list at a Dec. 8 meeting after discussing the matter during at least two public study sessions.

Magee is the only known middle school on the list thus far, and 6th-through-8th-graders would be joining students from the 9th to 12th grades at Sabino High School, about seven miles away.

The “sending” and “receiving” elementary schools on the list are all located within a 10-minute drive of one another.

In each case, students would switch schools as early as August, though Trujillo told reporters in September the idea of closing schools within the next two years was “a little ambitious.”

Trujillo first announced in late August that the school district would undertake a reconfiguration process.

District officials later said up to 10 schools could be shuttered.

On Friday, it was unclear if the schools announced between then and Monday were the only schools that were up for closure, or if more could be announced later.

An attempt that afternoon to each TUSD officials with questions about the possibility of more schools on the list was not immediately successful.

Trujillo and a 31-person committee of community members and elected officials worked for months to create the list, taking into account class sizes, transportation, empty classroom space and the availability of art, physical education, special education, preschool and extracurricular programs at each site.

The district also held a series of public meetings in September and early October to gather the community’s feedback on the consolidation process.

Parents expressed concerns about student-teacher ratios and school programs, along with the possibility of staff layoffs, what would happen to empty facilities and how the district would support students adjusting to new schools.