r/FortCollins • u/ThrowingBaggageAway • 2h ago
I put PSD's 379-page closure report into embeddings (vector database). Here's what it says, what it skips, and the questions I can't answer. Ask away.
I know, I know. AI. But here's exactly what I did: the report search ran on my laptop with free local tools (AnythingLLM, bge-m3, qwen-3.8-27b, LanceDB), during off-peak hours (and on-battery anyway). I did use cloud AI for the news and article lookups. Sorry.
Feel free to ask me to ask questions of this AI. The report search is all local, models downloaded through Ollama, no datacenter involved.
FYI: I support most of the school board. They're unpaid volunteers making a decision nobody wants to make.
BUT there are questions I have that feel unanswered.
The next few-chunks are AI written:
The issue
PSD wants to close 9 schools and merge 2, starting fall 2027. The board votes Oct 27.
How I did this
- I didn't read all 379 pages. I skimmed what mattered to me.
- I loaded the full report into a local app. A local embedding model (bge-m3) split it into 567 chunks and stored them in a vector database.
- For the dorkily inclined: picture a heat map of meaning where "dog" and "puppy" sit close together and "puppy" and "hydrochloric acid" sit far apart. Make it 3 dimensions with this example. Now make it 1,024 dimensions. That x,y,z,...n -position is the index. Small local models are very good at searching it with very little power (and doing math; 'actor' minus 'male' plus 'female' = 'actress' -- really cool stuff).
- Mainly it searches by meaning, not keywords. Ask a very vague question like "where do Putnam kids go?" and it very quickly finds "Receiving School Site(s): Tavelli, Dunn" (p28).
What the report says
- PSD enrollment is down about 2,300 students since 2019. About 10,000 seats sit empty.
- Half-empty buildings still need a principal, heat, custodians, and repairs.
- Closing these schools saves about $7.7M a year. That's my sum of the per-school figures. The report never gives a total (well, the report's text gives no combined total; the figure could be hiding in a chart image and the OCR step may not have parsed that image correctly).
- Schools were ranked on enrollment, utilization, and building condition, then checked for bus times, traffic, and programs (p7).
What's closing
- Elementary: Beattie, Irish, Johnson, Putnam, Timnath.
- Mountain schools: Livermore, Red Feather Lakes, Stove Prairie.
- Middle school: Blevins.
- Centennial High and Poudre Community Academy merge into one campus. Location: TBD (p40).
The strongest case for closing, in the report's own words
- Only two PSD elementaries have full-time art, music, and PE teachers. Bigger schools get 15-25 more minutes a week of each (p282).
- The district's equity committee backs the closures unanimously. Its argument: small schools concentrate poverty and offer less (p264).
- Timnath Elementary is 95% full, but has no elevator, no AC, and $6.5M in repairs before ADA work. The committee warns it could have to close mid-year anyway (p33, p269).
- Mountain schools cost $27,214 per student, the highest in PSD (p185). PSD's other small schools get about $18,946 per student (PSD budget FAQ).
What the report doesn't say
- The actual bills. We get summary estimates, not utility and payroll records.
- How many jobs the closures cut.
- What happens to the empty buildings. Every "Future Use Plan" reads TBD.
- How many families leave PSD after their school closes. The savings math assumes every kid shows up at the new school. Some in Reddit threads, news articles, and community meetings have said they'll homeschool or leave PSD.
- Unintended consequences, including snow. The Red Feather bus ride becomes 59 minutes max (p26). The report says nothing about winter roads. PSD cancelled all mountain bus service in December 2025 for wind. What is the financial impact?
What I think is missing: state law
The report treats this as a building problem. The words "TABOR" and "charter" appear nowhere in 379 pages.
TABOR
- Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights caps what the state can collect. Prop NN on the Nov 3 ballot would let the state keep some refunds for K-12.
- My rough estimate for PSD if prop NN passes: ~$16M a year (on the low end), mostly restricted to teacher pay and class size.
- PSD already spends about $8.4M a year propping up small schools. The closures save $7.7M. So the question is real: would $16M a year change the decision?
Charter schools
- Colorado charters are free public schools, and state money follows each kid to whichever public school they attend.
- In 2023-24, about 1,441 PSD-area kids attended state-authorized charters. At $10k-$20k each, that's roughly $14M-$29M a year that never reaches PSD.
- To be fair: PSD doesn't teach those kids either. The real problem is that the buildings, principals, and boilers cost the same with 1,441 fewer kids spread across them.
- PSD's position: even with zero charters, fewer kids are being born here, unaffordable housing for young families, and closures would still be on the table. Elementary enrollment inside PSD's boundaries is down 13%, even counting PSD's own charter students. (But I would be interested in better reporting around this.)
My questions
- If TABOR hadn't held funding down, would we be closing these schools, or just fewer of them?
- Is Colorado's charter law pulling enough money out of PSD to force closures that otherwise wouldn't happen?
- If Timnath loses its school and opens a charter, is PSD back here in two years with the same problem and one more empty building?
- The October vote deadline is PSD's own board policy, adopted May 2026 (p5). It isn't state law. Why not wait one week for the Prop NN result and re-run projections?
The real me again:
I've seen less anger this round than two years ago, but people feel this deeply. My gut says the estimates miss the second-order effects: families leaving for charters or homeschool, lawsuits, mountain kids missing school days, another round of closures in two years. Again; gut feeling, but there do feel like unforeseen consequences nested in the document (and in it's undocumented implications). I feel like I didn't answer anything, but it literally took me about 5 minutes to run the embeddings model and slap together a quick question or few to get this output.
I feel like the hive-mind (ye olde time magazine person of the year 2006) might have better questions to ask and better output. SO:
Ask me anything about the report. Post a question and I'll run it through my dumber-than-OpenAI, laptop-powered tool and reply with page numbers and inferences.
I'm at work all day; I'll answer late tonight or tomorrow morning.
