In a letter to parents dated March 13, the Tahoma School District announced it would be closing the Russell Ridge Center at the end of this school year.

But numerous parents expressed their concern the district didn’t go through the proper legal channels before making the decision to close the school.

According to RCW 28A.335.020, school boards must adopt a policy that allows for public involvement before a decision is made to close a school.

After the initial letter was sent to parents, a second one signed by Tahoma School District Superintendent Rob Morrow was sent out on March 19.

In it, Morrow stated the school board is going to provide the community with “a minimum of two opportunities” to address the board with their concerns over the center’s possible closure.

Kevin Patterson, director of communications for the district, said they will most likely schedule those public hearings in April. He said specific dates and times will be available soon.

When asked about the district’s policy of involving the public prior to a decision being made on a school closure, Tahoma School Board President Tami Henkel said they did follow procedure.

“We’ve been talking about this since October 2012,” she said in a phone interview.

In 2013, the board did a viability update on the center to evaluate whether to continue the program or not.

All the students at Russell Ridge attend the program part time while attending classes both on site and off site.

The current requirement is the Tahoma School District students attending Russell Ridge must add up to a minimum of 50 percent of the total full-time enrollment at the school. Currently there are 99 students attending Russell Ridge, which equals 68.48 full-time equivalent students. There are 51 Tahoma students equalling 36.26 full-time equivalent students, which is 53 percent of the total.

At the Sept. 12, 2014 meeting, the school board changed that criteria to align better with a cost-neutral format, Henkel said.

The board’s decision was to incrementally increase the Tahoma full-time enrollment  requirement over the next three years. It would go from requiring 50 percent Tahoma full-time students in 2014-15 to 55 percent in the 2015-16 school year, 65 percent the following year and then landing at 75 percent for the 2017-2018 school year.

Morrow said the decision to close Russell Ridge came after looking at a number of different factors, not just head counts.

“The governor’s current budget,” Morrow said, “is calling for implementing (Initiative) 1351 at the primary grades.”

Initiative 1351 directs the legislature to “allocate funds to reduce class sizes and increase staffing support for students in all K-12 grades.”

He said if that happens, the district will be short 43 classrooms and the same number of teachers next year. He said they will be short five elementary classrooms next year even without implementing Initiative 1351, which was passed by voters in the November 2014 election by about 40,000 votes.

Initiative 1351 directs the legislature to “allocate funds to reduce class sizes and increase staffing support for students in all K-12 grades.”

The initiative’s original language states kindergarten through third-grade class sizes would be reduced to 17 and fourth through 12th-grade class sizes would be reduced to 25. The reductions are even higher if more than 50 percent of enrolled students live in poverty. The fiscal impact to the state if all aspects of the initiative were to be implemented is estimated to cost about $4.7 billion through 2019.

With those budget constraints, Morrow said they had to look at whether the Russell Ridge Center was going to be cost effective to keep running.

The center, located on the campus of Cedar River Middle School, is an alternative education program that currently serves 99 students in and around the school district’s boundaries. Morrow described it as a home school co-op.

It opened in 1995 and serves as a way for home schooled children, grades Kindergarten through eighth grade, to get personalized in-class experience and socialization with other students. The students do some classes on-site and some off-site.

Lori Roberts, mother to three kids, two of which are students at Russell Ridge and one who would enroll next year, said the letter from Morrow came as a complete surprise.

“It feels like every spring the risk of this comes up, so we do talk to the board,” she said in a phone interview. “We were kind of surprised that the board gave us no indication that we would have to… fight for the school.”

Other parents shared similar reactions.

Larry Baldwin, whose two daughters attend Russell Ridge, said he appreciates the strain the district and school board are under, but wishes the discussion was more of a collaboration between administrators and parents.

Kara Reynolds, a mother to a former Russell Ridge student, wrote in an email to the school district the flexible schedule and personalized curriculum helped her son, Benicio Narciso, during his cancer treatment.

Reynolds and her son came from British Columbia to the Maple Valley area early last year, she wrote. Shortly after, her son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. After deciding to stay in this area permanently, Reynolds said she started looking at options for schools for her son.

She first planned to enroll him at Shadow Lake Elementary after a recommendation from her sister. But, because her son had been in and out of school for treatment, he had missed a lot of third grade.

Reynolds wrote in the letter her son needed a part-time program because of the side effects from radiation and the toll it took on him.

“A traditional school would not work for us right now,” she wrote. “He needed a slow entry into the community.”

She said she wasn’t expecting Russell Ridge to be anything more than the average school environment. But, she said she was surprised.

“The environment is smart, well attended to, creative, organized and very welcoming,” she wrote.

Her son started at Russell Ridge, attending six hours per week, and by the end of the year was attending nine hours per week.

“He made friends, he was challenged, and he had a schedule to stick to that was not overwhelming or impossible for him,” Reynolds wrote.

Now, her son has moved on to a more conventional school. But, she said, Russell Ridge “was a perfect gateway for him to get back into the regular school system.”

Henkel said the school board is open to new ideas and hopes someone comes to them with a “brilliant idea” that could solve the problem.

“Our board is always open to hearing what our families have to say,” she said. “We really do like to collaborate with our community.”

In the end, though, Henkel said they have to think about the whole picture.

“We really do have a responsibility to our district as a whole,” she said.