A Mesa parent · BVSD's own published numbers
Does the building have enough classrooms?
Bear Creek's capacity of 492 seats counts all 20 classrooms as general education classrooms. RISE and AIM need some of them.
492 seats assumes every classroom is a general education classroom.
Bear Creek's published capacity is 492. That number is 20 general purpose classrooms at BVSD's own multiplier of about 24.6 students per room. It holds only if all 20 rooms are running general education classes.
Two programs would share the building. RISE moves over from Mesa, where it uses three rooms. AIM is already at Bear Creek, in rooms the district has not published. Give the two programs three rooms between them, and 17 are left for general education. Seventeen rooms at the same multiplier is about 418 seats.
Three rooms is a floor, not a plan. BVSD has not published how many rooms either program would have at a combined school, or what those rooms would be.
418 seats, against a school of about 490.
Bear Creek has 330 students today and Mesa has 204, and nobody at Bear Creek leaves: 534 between them. In 2027-28, with fifth graders moving up and a new kindergarten class arriving, the combined school carries about 490. BVSD projects it in a range of 392 to 445.
Getting from 490 into that range means fewer students. Open enrollment is the lever that produces the reduction.
The reduction lands on Mesa's open enrollment families.
Under Policy JECC-R, Bear Creek's 61 open-enrolled students keep their seats: the school they enrolled in is still there. Mesa's 28 do not. Their school is closing, so they re-enter the lottery for a combined school that is already over its real capacity.
Mesa's entire open-enrolled population is 28 students. Even at 445, the optimistic end of BVSD's own range, all 28 of them are gone.
BVSD work session · September 15, 2026
BVSD described both halves of this at its own meeting.
Explaining how the combined school is projected: the range does not include the Mesa students who are open enrolled into Mesa, and new open enrollment at the combined school would have to be managed in the first year to get everybody in.
Glen Segrue 2:02:55A consolidated Bear Creek will not have the open enrollment capacity it has today, the same as other schools that are already full.
Dr. Rob Anderson 2:05:36How capacity is counted: classrooms over 600 square feet, times a per-room multiplier. Bear Creek has 20 such classrooms, and that is how the building gets to 492. Space those schools expanded into as they got smaller becomes classroom space again.
Rob Price 2:10:27Correcting the multiplier on the record: 20 rooms times 25 is not 492. The figure BVSD builds capacity on is an average general education class size of 24.58.
Dr. Rob Anderson 2:11:28Full transcript of the September 15 work session
Sources in the video: BVSD Resilient Schools proposal, Aug 25 2026; Annual Enrollment Trend Report, Feb 2026; Policy JECC-R. More of the math is at mesafamiliescount.org.
Before the vote
Ask BVSD where RISE and AIM go.
BVSD votes September 22. The room count is a question the district can answer, and has not.