Schools have been making the tough decision to shut down campuses.
The culprit is all the same — declining enrollment.
Also experiencing the same problem is the Arizona State School for the Deaf and the Blind.
KGUN 9 News anchor Concetta Callahan visited the school on Friday.
The school’s director said they’re hoping to partner with the Amphi School District and use one of its recently closed campuses as their own.
Albert Duff is the director at the Arizona State School for the Deaf and the Blind, known as ASDB for short. This is a statewide organization, with Tucson being the original campus built back in 1922. It sits on 56 acres. Duff explained it’s a facility too big as it continues to lose state funding.
“As students begin to decline, then funding begins to decline, and everything else is there. The campus was designed to hold 400 students, so we’re running right about 25% occupied at this point,” Duff said.
Since the 1990s, ASDB has been seeing one to two percent fewer students enroll. Duff said they’re currently in negotiations with the Amphi School District, hoping to occupy one of the campuses that recently closed due to low enrollment.
“The new facility is about a third the size. So, it right-sizes us to the number of students that we have and then allows us to reduce travel time for students around the campus, so they have more time in the classroom, hopefully producing better educational outcomes,” Duff said.
Currently, it costs $3 million a year to maintain the facility. With a school a third the size, Duff hopes to cut that number in half.
A plus for students is bigger classrooms.
“That’s actually one of the major identified faults of the current campus was that the campus was too small,” Duff said.
There’s a lot of equipment that goes into learning instruction at ASDB. Braille literature and high-tech braille computers that work like an iPad will all need to be relocated.
“Move a lot of IT infrastructure into the new site, making sure that communication abilities can be done in the classroom in order to meet the needs of our students,” Duff said.
Duff admitted this move comes with challenges. The school is still working out athletic components and other extracurricular activities.
If the deal goes through, ASDB is hoping to start the next upcoming school year on the new campus in August.
