Right-Sizing A School District: Suttons Bay Public Schools Launches New Process To Improve Operational Efficiency

Once upon a time, Suttons Bay Public Schools (SBPS) boasted an enrollment of approximately 1,200 students. Today, the district is closer to about 600. According to SBPS Superintendent Casey Petz, there are many reasons for that dip, from shifting demographics to a lack of affordable housing in Suttons Bay and throughout Leelanau County. The result, though, is that the district is structurally “too big” for its current enrollment, with facilities, programming, and other foundational aspects still geared toward a bigger enrollment than SBPS has today – or, theoretically, ever will have again. That discrepancy will be the main topic of conversation at an SBPS school board meeting scheduled for 6pm this evening (Monday). There, the board will formally kick off a process that Petz says has been percolating for quite some time: a strategic “right-sizing” of the district.

What does “right-sizing” mean when it comes to a school district? Petz says the process is all about “creating the right fit for campus and buildings and programs in the of medium and long-term future.” Prior to moving to Suttons Bay, Petz lived in the Detroit area, where he says right-sizing models tended to look at growth and expansion. “Our right-sizing model [at SBPS] is more about being efficient – or lean, if you will,” he tells the Leelanau Ticker.

Petz, who marks three years as SBPS superintendent this month, has been banging the drum for right-sizing since his earliest days with the district. In fact, when the Leelanau Ticker first sat down with Petz in May 2020, he cited “right-size and repeat” as a core mantra, stressing the importance of taking annual looks at enrollment numbers and examining strategic uses of buildings, staff, and more. However, because Petz just happened to start the superintendent gig a month before a global pandemic struck, the district has largely been preoccupied with other things – until now.

“When I was hired in February 2020, a month before we closed schools for COVID, one of the things that I talked about with the board right at the start was right-sizing our district to the population that we have now and expect in the foreseeable future,” he says. “We have thought a lot about that process since. For instance, we have thought a lot about what our projections are telling us about who's going to be able to live [in our area] and what those numbers are going to look like. And we've also thought a lot about our reality. I don't know if most people know the history, but we were once a little over 1,200 Kids at Suttons Bay. Our current enrollment is around 600. And that’s not because of one story or one thing, but it’s notable that our projections don't have us in a growth model that will ever return us to 1,200 students – certainly not in my lifetime.”

Right-sizing of school districts is something that many northern Michiganders have seen play out in real time at Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS), which has gone through periods of both extreme expansion and extreme contraction over the past 30 years. In the mid-1990s, exploding enrollment at Traverse City Senior High School (the school hit 3,300 students in 1995) forced TCAPS to build a second high school. Soon, Traverse City West Senior High was born, opening during the 1997-98 school year. In the decades since, though, declining enrollment across the district has forced TCAPS to make its own moves toward leaner operations, mostly by closing multiple elementary schools.

In part because of that history, Petz says many local parents are extremely wary of conversations around right-sizing. “It doesn't matter whether you're expanding or contracting [as a district],” he acknowledges. “That can cause a lot of problems for families, and a lot of anxiety in the community.”

At very least, Petz assures that SBPS won’t be closing down schools. “We are a single-campus school district, so we don't have satellite schools or satellite properties like TCAPS does. We’re all one campus and are pretty connected. But we will be looking at our programs, spaces, places – including our buildings and campus size – to ask questions like, ‘How do we maximize what we have?’ ‘What do we need and what do we not need?’ ‘How can we appropriately size ourselves to the population we serve and expect to serve?’ It’s a complicated process, but it’s a much less complicated scenario than, say, having four different elementary schools and deciding which two you're going to keep. It’s the same problem [that TCAPS faced], it’ll just be a different process and different outcome because it’s all one parcel.”

While preliminary conversations about right-sizing have been happening within the district for quite some time, Petz says that tonight’s meeting will officially bring that process “into the public realm.” The first step is a presentation this evening from a construction management firm, which will “present the process of what [right-sizing] might look like for our school community.” From there, conversations will touch on everything from local population statistics and school enrollment projections to SBPS buildings and other assets.

Still, Petz stresses that there are “no actual board action items” on the agenda this evening. Rather, tonight’s meeting and presentation are largely intended to bring the community into the fold, notify them that the right-sizing process is kicking off, and encourage public engagement and involvement. “We want to start to put that awareness out there,” he says. “There are no decisions being made now. This meeting is awareness: It’s laying foundational groundwork, it's recruiting the people who want to be part of that upfront, and it’s showing people that, ‘Hey, we’re being measured, we're being careful, we're engaging the community, and we’re trying to go slow to, at some point, go fast.’”

Petz assures that the district will approach any changes “carefully and cautiously in order to make those shifts on behalf of the kids that we serve.” Still, he’s adamant that this process needs to happen, and that it needs to happen now.

“We’ve got a real problem to navigate here,” he says. “We've got a really big campus. We've got a lot of buildings within that campus. We've got a lot of cost and overhead. So there are a lot of considerations to make as we right-size our district to our projected enrollment. And we also need to have a conversation about local housing, because that's a big piece of this. Enrollment here doesn’t stay the same or grow; it shrinks. And part of the issue is that affordable housing is snapped up. Every time you have a home here that sells to somebody who doesn't live here, it’s a problem for us. If you’ve got less people each year, and you don’t adjust to it, eventually the two things cross and something has to go, really not by choice but by necessity. I’d rather think about those changes before we really need to implement them, and then make reasonable decisions and determinations with our school board and our school community.”

Tonight’s board meeting starts at 6pm and will be held in the Suttons Bay High School Board Meeting Room at 500 S Elm Street. Virtual meeting details are available here.