Please delay voting on the consolidation of Bear Creek and Mesa until the community’s concerns can be adequately addressed and the proposal can be modified to ensure that it actually achieves its aims of budgetary savings, improved student experience, and the community’s top priority - smaller class sizes. As it stands, it appears to have only limited *potential* for savings and, for the southwest Table Mesa area, would result in huge class sizes in a building that would be overcrowded (especially considering RISE and AIM’s space needs) and not conducive to learning (especially given its open classrooms). When the proposal was presented, it was mentioned that the district-wide sentiment was that grade reconfiguration was not desirable. That may be true district-wide, but I believe that the Mesa and Bear Creek communities would favor and benefit from that (PK-2, 3-5) over the current proposal, at least until the schools comfortably fit together. Grade reconfiguration would also preserve space for the Mesa preschool, in its current location. Here is a summary of the community’s concerns related to viability and student experience: * The proposal’s enrollment projections for the combined school seem to be underestimates and have not been justified. Rolling combined current K-4 enrollment at the two schools forward one year and adding a kindergarten class the same size as this year's projects that the building will be at capacity. Additionally, the proposal does not detail whether various factors that would increase the combined school's enrollment (e.g. Community Montessori’s relocation out of the neighborhood) have been taken into account, but the low enrollment projections suggest that they have not. * The building does not seem to be large enough to accommodate the projected enrollment, especially since BVSD’s own projected 2030 resident student population exceeds the building capacity. * Besides pure enrollment numbers, it is unclear if the Bear Creek building has enough classrooms to support the students and programs, especially given that general education will require at least 18 classrooms, RISE uses 3, and AIM likely uses around 3 as well. * While the stated aims were to improve the student experience and reduce class sizes, the combined school appears destined for overcrowding and huge class sizes, with loud open classrooms. This would have an adverse effect on the general education population, students with sensory needs, RISE students, and AIM students. No guarantees have been provided with regard to max class sizes, classroom allocations for grades and programs, building modifications, or accommodation of all students without modular buildings. * There has been no transparency about whether Open Enrollment students would be kicked out of the combined school, but the low enrollment projections suggest that most or all will. Additionally, what has been discussed suggests that the approach would unfairly only affect Mesa Open Enrollment students rather than the Open Enrollment students at both Mesa and Bear Creek. * The fate of the preschool at Mesa has not been decided, even though it should be considered simultaneously, since it could make one option (e.g. PK-2, 3-5) more favorable than another (e.g. consolidation into the Bear Creek building with no room to spare). The community should not have to guess at what the proposal entails, and the Board should not be rushed to adopt a risky proposal with the only guaranteed effect of massive disruption to kids and families.