by Cavan Pasek
The academic excellence, environment, and culture of Ouray School has perennially attracted students, but expensive housing deters new families. Superintendent Tod Lokey commented, “We’ve lost a number of families down valley or out of the region altogether due to housing prices.”
Recently, Covid did cause a bump in enrollment, however. “We were at something of a low in 2019,” said Mr. Lokey, “and then we actually increased our student population through the two years of the Covid pandemic.” Many larger schools decreased in enrollment but Ouray School actually “experienced a 10% increase,” he continued.
In technology teacher Dee James’ long history here, she said, “we seem to be cyclical. For a few years [enrollment is] big, then it goes down, and it flattens out for a while.” Mr. Lokey’s numbers agree: since the Covid pandemic, he said, “we have decreased in size to that level right before the pandemic.”
In fact, currently, we are in a low compared to our average. Administrative assistant Paige Sackman remarked that “we are in a decreased cycle of enrollment but it's nothing we haven’t seen before.”
Over the last decade, housing prices have increased dramatically. “I’ve seen it skyrocket,” said Mr. Lokey, who is constantly on the lookout for affordable housing for incoming teachers. What’s been fortunate for the district, he said, is how he gets “a lot of calls from landlords who want to offer their rooms, homes, apartments to school district or city staff first.”
Families want their children to grow up in a close-knit community. One family, Ms. Paige recalled, was “looking for housing and had found something, but all the houses around them were summer houses. We want our students to grow in a community where their neighbors are school kids.” That family ended up settling in Ridgway.
The good news is that, in the younger grades, we have very healthy populations. “We continue to have about 60 students in the middle school, with about 40 in the high school,” Mr. Lokey said; and there are 81 students presently in the elementary school. He is optimistic because “if those class sizes hold we could be closer to 200 students PK-12 which would be fantastic.”
But housing prices in Ouray have a real effect on families. Mr. Lokey recalled a conversation he had at the end of the Spring concert series. “The hardest conversation I had was when three families approached asking what was going on with housing because all three of their landlords had decided to sell. So they were out.”