This story was initially published in the Pikes Peak Bulletin.
Last week, the Colorado Springs School District 11 Board of Education unanimously approved a $500,000 request for proposal (RFP) to hire a strategic communications firm.
“We’re asking for the authority to explore this opportunity,” said D11 Superintendent Michael Gaal during the Aug. 6 board meeting. “If you give us this guidance tonight, that gives us the ability to issue an RFP to see if we can find the type of services that we’re looking for. We are not asking for carte blanche blanket to spend this money. This type of contract we would have to bring back to the board for your review and your final approval … We’re asking for the authority to go externally and treat this like an organization of $400 million … that represents 23,000 plus customers in how we want to position ourselves in a market space. I’m not talking about buying ads on the radio. I’m not talking about putting a little screen saver on the front end of a local movie theater. I’m talking about engaging with professionalized advertising and marketing companies that say, ‘How is it that you ensure that your community trusts in the product that you provide?’ We are trying to turn the ship of many many decades of people not believing in District 11 and we have the data to prove it. Enrollment has been down, particularly in traditional schools, for 20 plus years. At the same time that the population in this city has doubled, many of us live outside of the boundary of this district and find our way to drive to work because the city’s just not that big. Which means if you love that school, you’d be able to drive your kid there. We have got to invest.”
Gaal argued that spending money on strategic advertising could result in increased enrollment. “I’ll give you the number – it’s $11,000 per pupil,” he said. “We’ve tried this in little microcosms twice. We did a bit of a northeastern push with a local ad agency two years ago and we saw a 60-child increase in enrollment in the northeastern band that paid for that investment. It was still too small. This year we’ve had our enrollment office really try and close the gap into some areas that we saw that we were losing matriculation. Again, as of this date, we have lost zero kids from that elementary school that we targeted, and they all stayed inside the district.”
D11 has been experiencing declining enrollment since 2009. During a 2023 work session, the firm Western Demographics presented the board with an enrollment forecast that noted the district has lost 4,698 students in the past five years. The presentation also warned that in order to avoid falling below 20,000 students in K-12 enrollment by the 2026-27 school year, enrollment retention and recovery strategies are necessary.
Gaal noted that a potential marketing firm could help the district understand where they are losing students. “How is it that we lost 800 and 900 kids the two years prior to COVID?” he asked. “Not during COVID, prior to COVID. Nobody’s ever asked that question out loud … We have a rockstar in Chris Kilroy at enrollment and we have a rockstar and Dr. Jessica Wise and leading our engagement team, and there’s no way the two of them are ever going to be able to put together the poll to find those 800 and 900 families and where they are and really get the answer.”
The 2023 presentation noted declining birth rates and smaller families as factors impacting enrollment. “You saw the demographic study from two years ago,” said Gaal. “Most of the gain that we’re finding is us just recapturing lost market. We are having less children per household. So I would not like to say that you would do $300,000 to get $10 million in new enrollment. What you might do is $300,000 to not lose $15 million more in enrollment as people continue to flee.”
The D11 Board President Parth Melpakam expressed support for the RFP. “Over the last three years we have introduced a number of wonderful student programs,” he said. “The study abroad program, the Mitchell Promise [scholarship], which turned into the D11 Promise. When I engage with the citizens in the community, several of them are still not aware of these programs, and that’s the message that we need to carry over to our community. If this type of communication coming from a reputable company with experience in this area is going to accomplish that, and this is going to translate into roughly [a] 40-to-50 student increase in enrollment that is going to end up paying for this contract.”
Deputy Superintendent Brandan Comfort also noted that any potential marketing firm could help the district pass a much-needed bond effort. Voters narrowly rejected D11’s efforts at a $350 million bond in 2021.
“The board is considering a generational opportunity there, one in which the city has never seen, and that obviously I believe can transform the district for a long time,” said Comfort. “My greatest fear is if the taxpayers say ‘No, we don’t believe in that, we don’t believe in you, we don’t think that’s right.’ My greatest fear is that because they don’t know, they say no. We need to make sure that they know the truth about what District 11 is about, and so that’s why I think this is a wise decision.”
