Chino Valley superintendent outlines enrollment loss, recommends Heritage Middle reconfiguration in 2026
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Summary
Superintendent Cindy Daniels said Chino Valley Unified has lost about 12% of students since Arizona's universal vouchers, and the district's administrative team recommends reconfiguring Heritage Middle School to serve only grades 7 and 8 beginning in 2026 while expanding dual-enrollment at CVHS through Yavapai College.
Superintendent Cindy Daniels told parents that Chino Valley Unified School District is confronting enrollment-driven budget pressures and outlined an administrative recommendation to reconfigure Heritage Middle School.
"We have lost about 12% of our student population," Daniels said, attributing the decline over the past three years in part to the statewide rollout of universal vouchers and local demographic trends. She said Yavapai County has a relatively low share of school-age children and that some families have used empowerment scholarship accounts to move children into private or home-based schooling.
Faced with reduced revenue, Daniels said district leaders are pursuing a mix of cost-saving steps while trying to preserve educational opportunities. "We're shopping around for cheaper insurance," she said, and the district is reducing staff levels "almost exclusively through retirement or relocation," rather than involuntary layoffs.
Daniels also described program expansion at Chino Valley High School (CVHS). "We've made decisions that will enable us to expand programming at CVHS to provide pathways for students to earn their associate's degree free of charge while they're still in high school in our partnership with Yavapai College," she said.
As a separate measure to address empty classrooms and concentrate resources, Daniels said the administrative team has recommended a grade reconfiguration affecting Heritage Middle and the Del Rio campus. The recommendation calls for Heritage Middle School to house only seventh- and eighth-grade students beginning in 2026; sixth-grade teachers would move next door to the Del Rio campus, and current fifth graders would remain at Del Rio as sixth graders. The transcript records the recommendation but does not include a board vote or formal approval in this communication.
Daniels closed by inviting questions and community feedback and thanked families for choosing the district. The address did not record a timetable for final approval of the recommendation or a public hearing schedule; those details were not specified in the transcript.