On October 1, the Olathe Board of Education voted 7–0 to close six schools after the 2026–27 school year.
We're Olathe Families for Closure. We read the data, we went to the meetings, and we'd like to get on with it. Meanwhile, others would like to see the plan for the plan for the student plan.
This website does not collect petition signatures. We'd suggest nobody bother.
"Before we discuss the boundaries, can we see the weighting matrix for the factors used to weight the matrix?"
The vote is done. The schools are closing. The only question left is whether families spend this year preparing for next fall or fighting a decision that isn't coming back.
Same enrollment as 2001, nine more buildings, and 4,000 fewer students on the way. No petition, hearing, or spreadsheet changes that math. Grieving a school is fair. Pretending it can be saved isn't.
Every month spent on reviews and re-reviews is a month families don't know where their kids are going, teachers don't know their next classroom, and the savings don't reach anyone. Delay doesn't protect kids. It just keeps them in limbo longer.
Boundaries, bus routes, new friends, new teachers. That's where parents can actually make a difference this year, and it starts at the boundary meetings, not the petition table.
A school district's budget isn't a household budget. It runs on separate pots of money with legal strings attached: bond money can build buildings but can't pay salaries or the electric bill, and the state doesn't fully fund the special-education services the district is legally required to provide. The people who manage all of that full-time, plus an outside consultant and a parent task force, know those books better than a Facebook thread does.
Your kitchen-table budget is hard enough. Theirs has state formulas, bond restrictions, and federal mandates in it. Maybe let them handle it.
Their slogan is "6,100 Voices." Their homepage says the work begins now. The vote was October 1. Here's what that work looks like.
Show families the complete student plan before the vote.
A complete student plan, delivered before the student plan is drafted.
Show us viable boundary scenarios first.
A final boundary map for boundaries nobody has voted on, finished before the meetings where we give input on it.
Explain how the factors were weighted.
Show us the weighting matrix for the factors used to weight the matrix.
Ask the state to review the decision.
Have someone in Topeka re-read a plan that a consultant, two committees and a unanimous board already read.
Get trained as a petition circulator.
Spend your fall evenings learning to collect signatures for a state review that, in Emporia this year, found the closure reasonable anyway.
"They said" items are paraphrased from the group's public statements and news coverage. "We heard" is our opinion, and it's not kind.
Notice the question that keeps coming up: why these six? Nobody is arguing the district has the right number of buildings. The math says some schools close. So every push to pull a school off the list is really a push to put another one on it, along with the kids, teachers, and families who'd absorb the hit instead.
Fighting for your own school is a natural reaction. But it's not a principle. "Close someone else's" isn't a better plan, just a different address.
If you think a different school should close, say which one and tell its families. That's the honest version of the argument.
They asked for more data. We made some, using the same standard of evidence.
The hearing was the last stop on a long road, not the on-ramp. If you showed up for the first time in September, you were catching the train as it pulled into the station.
We, the undersigned, request that the State of Kansas pause everything until we feel done asking.
This form does nothing. Neither, as far as we can tell, will the real one.
The serious part: a petition can trigger a state review, but it doesn't reopen the decision on its own. Earlier this year, after a petition in Emporia, a state review found Emporia's closure reasonable, and the school is closing anyway. What a review mostly adds is time, and that time comes out of the boundary and transition work families actually need finished.
Sign our equally pointless petitionHere's a real chart, from real district numbers. It's the one that never seems to make it into their 6,100 questions.
Olathe serves about the same number of elementary students it did in 2001 but runs nine more elementary schools. Every under-filled building still needs heat, a roof, a principal, a nurse, and a custodian. That money comes out of classrooms.
Same kids spread over more buildings means the average school is about a quarter emptier than in 2001. Closing five gets back about half the gap. (2001's 24 schools = today's 33 minus the 9 the district says it added.)
Estimated yearly operating savings once the six buildings close.
Already cut over the past six years, along with about 270 positions.
Projected drop in students from the 2019 peak over the next 15 years.
District employees losing their jobs over the closures, per the superintendent.
New attendance boundaries go to the board in December, with a vote expected in January 2027. The district is holding school-by-school meetings. That's where questions about bus routes, walk zones, and keeping kids together will actually change something.
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