Early this month, The Center for Reinventing Public Education convened a group of current and former superintendents and experts to help shape questions for a national survey on how district leaders are coping with the financial pressures created by declining enrollment and federal funding cuts. The survey results will come out this fall, but our informants flagged several important considerations that district and state leaders need to grapple with right now, before the next budget cycle, before the next round of collective bargaining.

The financial challenges districts face today are just the beginning. In many districts, the kindergarten and first-grade classes coming through the door are smaller than the ones before. Low birth rates, sharp reductions in immigration, continued family migration away from cities and growing enrollment in charter and private schools of choice are all pushing in the same direction. District leaders who believe they are managing a temporary dip are likely wrong. This is a long-term shift, and the numbers will keep declining as long as newer classes of students are smaller than those they succeed. 

District costs keep rising, so doing nothing is not an option. Even a district that adds no new programs, hires no new staff and signs no new contracts will see its costs rise. Teacher step increases escalate pay automatically without any new collective bargaining agreement. Benefits and energy costs track inflation. Deferred maintenance on buildings and equipment eventually becomes unavoidable. A district can do everything to keep costs steady and still watch its budget deteriorate year by year. As one superintendent put it during our discussion: “You start with the painless solutions… And after a year or two…now you’re into painful cuts.” 

Parents and voters don’t know how bad it is, and district leaders are keeping them in the dark. The gap between public perception and fiscal reality is wide and growing. Superintendents habitually project confidence and avoid talking through budgetary tradeoffs and hard decisions; explaining what things actually cost often creates confusion, anger and confrontation. Newer leaders often lack the background to understand and explain the complexities of their districts’ financial crises. As a result, most people hold significant misconceptions about basic facts, from the real cost of special education services to what teachers take home in pay; they attribute budget shortfalls to mismanagement. As one advisor told us: “Families don’t know this stuff is going on… but they know that their kids are not where they need to be.” 

This lack of understanding undermines public support when it’s needed most. Local groups — including teacher unions, parents protecting schools and programs, social service advocates and others — fear losing resources they rely on. Since they don’t have the full picture, they naturally assume that districts can make ends meet if they tighten belts. At a time when teachers and families are facing rising costs in their private lives, many people think of taxpayer-funded schools as flush with resources and able to fill gaps. The lack of clarity from the districts guarantees pushback, and the result is political gridlock, not thoughtful fiscal strategy. This is where many districts across the country are stuck right now. 

States are not coming to the rescue. Federal cuts to domestic programs under the Trump Administration are setting off intense competition for state dollars. Schools will not be alone in that fight. Healthcare, transportation, housing and other civic necessities will be pressing state legislatures at the same time. The idea that states will ride to the rescue of districts facing structural deficits is not realistic in this environment. And it is disingenuous for district leaders to suggest this is a solution.

Our advisors were honest that they do not have a full set of answers. But they were clear that superintendents cannot afford to wait for the survey results, or for clearer signals from Washington or for the next school board election. CRPE has been studying and the for more than 30 years, and we have seen what works — and what doesn’t — for struggling districts. Here are some ways districts can act now to start telling the truth and prepare for what’s to come. 

First, calculate and forecast honest numbers. Not optimistic enrollment projections or revenue figures that assume federal dollars that may not arrive. Real numbers, with real ranges of uncertainty, shared internally first and then publicly with enough context so people understand how the situation got so bad, and what’s at stake. 

Then, go public with what you know and ask for help. Community members cannot engage in a meaningful way if they don’t understand the situation. The instinct to project confidence by withholding bad news almost always backfires, and it precludes the public conversation that might actually generate support for difficult decisions. Asking for help will generate new ideas and also build trust.

That means no longer pretending that extreme measures are off the table. If teacher layoffs and school closures are genuinely avoidable right now, say so, but don’t rule anything out entirely. Setting clear and realistic expectations will build trust and credibility that can help if the situation worsens. 

And it requires building real relationships with state officials and legislators, not just formal contacts. District leaders who have honest, ongoing conversations with their state counterparts will be better positioned to make their case when state budgets are being divided up. For their part, state education associations should be ready to step in with more accurate forecasts, financial expertise and support to superintendents and school boards stuck in gridlock.

Telling the truth isn’t a complete solution for climbing out of budget crises that are years in the making, but it is a starting point for thousands of local efforts to preserve children’s opportunities under conditions that our institutions were never designed to handle. 

The survey we are fielding this fall may reveal examples of districts that have found better answers. We hope it will. But the place to start is not with waiting for more data. Instead, leaders who have a stake in their public schools must gear up for tough conversations and tell the truth about where things stand.

OKLAHOMA CITY — After hours of witness testimony and pages of evidence, a struggling Oklahoma City charter school still has not convinced a state board that it should be allowed to stay open for another year.

The Statewide Charter School Board on Monday made the rare vote to terminate the founding charter contract for Proud To Partner Leadership Academy. The board first voted 9-1 to declare there is “clear and convincing evidence” the school violated that contract before agreeing unanimously to proceed toward canceling it.

Board members made their decision after a lengthy and uncommon termination hearing that began April 29 and continued on Monday. A few more procedural steps remain before the school’s charter contract could be canceled officially, after which point its state funding would be cut off.

If the southwest Oklahoma City high school closes, its 100 students will have to return to their home districts or find another educational option for the next academic year.

The only way to avoid a shutdown is if the school makes “significant changes structurally” in the coming days, said Brian Shellem, who leads the statewide board. He said the board would “extend a hand” to the school and its attorneys to explore options.

Proud To Partner’s superintendent, Dawn Bowles, said the school’s leaders will wait to hear from the state board about what alternatives are available. In the meantime, students are “in limbo of knowing where they will actually be next year,” she said.

“We are still devoted and committed to doing what’s best on behalf of the families that we serve,” Bowles said after the vote.

Throughout the termination hearing, state officials described Proud to Partner, known as PTPLA, as a school in financial and operational disarray since it opened in July 2024.

Attorneys representing PTPLA said the school was unfairly targeted in a “rush to judgment” and wasn’t given proper due process to address concerns.

“The evidence here will show there’s been a sort of fearmongering, a sort of hysteria, a flame of emotions that were overblown and overindulged,” the school’s attorney, Kwame Mumina, said during the first day of the hearing.

Members of the statewide board’s staff testified that they came away with grave concerns about the school’s academic quality after visiting it.

Statewide Charter School Board executive director Rebecca Wilkinson, who visited PTPLA at least 15 times, said she saw signs of poor engagement of students. She reported seeing students sleeping or sitting in front of computers while not logged into classwork.

“I was concerned that too often students were not able to even tell me the course that they were working in, much less what they were doing,” she said.

Wilkinson said she had further concerns over whether the school’s special education and child nutrition services complied with law and the charter contract.

PTPLA finances also raised red flags when the school finished its first year with a $250,000 deficit. This school year, three teachers were laid off from the small teaching staff because of a lack of funds.

“This school is spending money it doesn’t have, and that is an issue,” said Thomas Schneider, the board’s attorney and deputy general counsel at the Attorney General’s Office.

Wilkinson initially reported seeing only during a site visit this fall. PTPLA leaders said the report was false and the three laid-off teachers continued working as volunteers. Those teachers have since been rehired on part-time pay.

Multiple members of the board’s staff and Oklahoma State Department of Education officials testified to having difficulty getting PTPLA administrators to respond to issues and to file financial reports on time.

School officials acknowledged they struggled with financial and operational difficulties, but they said it never compromised student learning. They said they were caught off-guard when the statewide board placed PTPLA on a November meeting agenda to discuss deficiencies at the school.

The statewide board in that November meeting ultimately .

Sharri Coleman, PTPLA’s school board president, said the state was too quick to punish rather than offer support.

“If we’re all for students, then you as a board, as my authorizer, would help my board to make sure that we are getting the supports that we need so that we can help those students,” Coleman said on the witness stand.

After being placed on probation, PTPLA’s board from the state and contended there was “nothing to fix.”

Statewide board members over the following months, contending school leaders refused to cooperate fully with state oversight. They finally ran out of patience in January, when they .

Bowles, PTPLA’s superintendent, warned that closing the school would harm the underprivileged students it was designed to serve.

“Most importantly, it will take away an opportunity to provide an education that is aligned to the needs of our Black and brown families in Oklahoma City,” she said during the hearing.

For the charter contract to be canceled, the statewide board must vote again to approve findings of fact from the termination hearing. That vote could take place as soon as next week, Shellem said.

PTPLA then would have 10 days to file an appeal with the board and, if rejected, to take the matter to district court.

Bowles didn’t confirm or reject the idea of challenging the state board in court.

“Right now, we’ll wait to hear from them as to what those next steps are,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

School closures are an incendiary issue in nearly every corner of California, as enrollment declines and expenses climb. The topic has sparked parent revolts, teacher strikes and school boards’ desperate attempts to keep districts financially afloat.

And then there’s Orick.

The picturesque town in northern Humboldt County has a historic school with five classrooms, a gym, a vegetable garden and an expansive play field. Its current enrollment: nine. Its expenses: $118,000 per student per year, more than five times the state average. 

California has dozens of school districts with enrollments under 100 and higher-than-average expenses. Most of these districts are in remote areas miles from the next nearest school. But as urban districts grapple with the threat of school closures and the inevitable backlash from families and staff, rural schools face an even more heart-wrenching scenario: close the school and decimate the town.

“Close the school? It comes up all the time,” said Orick Elementary School District Superintendent Justin Wallace. “But I’d say it’s an equity issue. We have families who can’t afford a lot, and this school provides the most consistent setting for our kids. They’re safe, they’re well fed, they’re learning.”

Most of these rural towns once had booming local economies. Logging, ranching, farming, mining and other industries employed generations of families. In the 1960s Orick had 3,000 people and nearly 300 students in its school. There were seven lumber mills, grocery stores, restaurants, churches, even a movie theater. 

But as California’s economy changed and jobs in these towns vanished, many communities struggled to find a new purpose. In Orick, the lumber mills gradually closed, the National Park Service claimed much of the surrounding land and residents moved elsewhere. Now, Orick has about 300 people and an average household income that’s just under $39,000 a year — a third of the state average. According to Orick School’s , Orick residents “experience high rates of poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, domestic violence, substance abuse, and run-ins with the criminal justice system due to limited resources and high community rates of intergenerational trauma.”

‘Terrified’ of closure

In towns like Orick, the school serves as a savior, of sorts. ����’s a community hub, one of the few sources of decent-paying jobs and a symbol of hope for the future. ����’s a central part of the town’s identity. The school in Orick operates as a food pantry for the community, gives away clothes to families in need, hosts Narcotics Anonymous meetings and runs a toddler playgroup. The district bought a washer and dryer so residents have a place to do laundry.

Kimberly Frick is the fifth generation in her family to attend Orick School. She remembers when the classrooms were full, students won trophies and the town was like a close-knit family. Now she’s president of the school board and fights to keep the school open. Saving the school, she said, is tantamount to saving the town. 

She and Wallace scour the area to find new students for the school. Every time a new family moves to town, they visit and try to persuade them to enroll their children. Other community members chip in, as well, by fixing up homes, keeping the town clean and participating in the volunteer fire department, water district and other local services.

“I feel terrified about the possibility of the school closing. I’d hate to see it happen on my watch,” Frick said. “The facility is clean, safe, well maintained. We provide a high-quality, individualized education for each child.”

Orick, whose name originates from the language of the nearby Yurok tribe, sits in a lush valley along Redwood Creek, nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Ranges. A herd of about 60 elk roam through the town and are frequent visitors to the school play field. There’s a pizza truck, a small convenience store and a newly refurbished hotel. A rodeo draws crowds every July.

But much of the town is abandoned or dilapidated. A trailer park near the school is strewn with trash and broken furniture. Many of the buildings are boarded up. There’s no gas station. The post office is only open a few hours a day.

Budget breakdown

California funds its schools based on how many students show up every day. But small districts get most of their money in grants, in order to protect them from wild fluctuations in revenue. Last year Orick received $774,000 from the state and federal governments. The school gets extra money because so many of its students have high needs: all are low-income and more than half receive special education services. Some years, numerous students are homeless or in foster care.

Most of the budget goes toward salaries. The school has four full-time staff: two teachers, an administrative assistant and Wallace’s position, which includes serving as superintendent, principal, literacy coach and special education director. A janitor, cook, counselor, special education teacher and after-school teacher all work part time. Maintaining the school buildings is expensive: heating bills can cost $1,100 a month. So is transportation, because everything is far away. When the students take swim lessons, for example, a driver transports them 30 miles south to McKinleyville. Whatever funds are left over go toward student supplies and enrichment activities like field trips.

An obvious way for the state to save money would be to merge Orick School District with its neighbor, Big Lagoon Union Elementary District, 15 miles south. But the merged district would only save money on facility costs and one superintendent’s salary, totaling less than $200,000 a year, because the new merged school would have higher expenses, such as the cost of transporting students 30 miles round-trip every day. 

A merger would also alienate one of the communities, Wallace said. Both communities are highly invested in their schools and prize their independence and local control, he said. 

How to close a district

In the early 20th century, California had more than 3,500 school districts, each with its own school board, superintendent and unique traditions. To save money, the state gradually winnowed the number down to the 1,000 that exist today. But there are holdouts. Sonoma County, for example, has 40 school districts, some with only a handful of students.

“����’s one of the most common questions we get: Why do we have 40 school districts?” said Eric Wittmershaus, spokesman for the Sonoma County Office of Education. “Everyone in the community agrees it’s too many. The problem is that no one wants to close their school.”

California has a lax attitude toward closing under-enrolled schools. The state lets a district’s average daily attendance slip below six before it intervenes. In those cases, the county can request a temporary waiver, in hopes that enrollment increases, or start the process of consolidating the district with one of its neighbors. But consolidation rarely happens because local officials and voters have the ultimate say.

In 2011, the Legislative Analyst’s Office the minimum district size to 100, but the recommendation was never implemented. In fact, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s current budget includes a 20% boost in funding for schools that the state deems to be “,” which are elementary schools with fewer than 97 students – or high schools with fewer than 287 students – at least 10 miles from the nearest other school. 

Grand juries in and counties have recommended consolidating small districts to save money, but neither of those reports led to changes. 

Still, some experts say that financial realities may force the issue. Enrollment is declining nearly everywhere and it might not be the best use of taxpayer money to pay for half-empty classrooms and deserted playgrounds.

“Do we need to provide a school in every community? A post office? What if that community barely exists?” said Carrie Hahnel, senior associate partner at Bellwether, an education research nonprofit. “We guarantee a free public education to every child, but do we guarantee a school in every community?”

Now and then, districts will shutter. Last year, Green Point Elementary District, deep in the Klamath mountains, consolidated with a neighboring district when its enrollment fell to three (its per-pupil spending was $108,000 a year). In Sonoma County, Kashia Elementary District, with eight students last year, is at risk of closing next year.

Schools reclaimed by nature

Enrollment in Humboldt County has been declining steadily since at least the 1990s, and isn’t expected to rebound any time soon. A century ago the county had about 100 school districts, essentially one in every mill town, but as the mills closed the districts gradually closed, too.

Some of those towns — and their schools — have been swallowed up by the redwood forests. The old logging town of Falk, for example, had a school, mill, post office, dance hall and about 400 residents. After the mill closed, the town gradually emptied out and the Sierra Pacific lumber company, which owned the land, tore down whatever buildings were left in 1979. “Aside from the rose bushes and English ivy, the town of Falk has literally disappeared,” according to the county’s visitor guide. 

Michael Davies-Hughes, the county superintendent of schools, encourages small districts to plan ahead to avoid abrupt mid-year closures, which are disruptive to students, families and staff. 

“We want districts to be proactive, so they have options,” Davies-Hughes said. “For some, the current model may be increasingly difficult to maintain.”

Outdoor ed and Native traditions

In Orick, older students take a bus 40 minutes every day to attend high school in McKinleyville. Wallace and Frick said it’s unrealistic to put younger children on a bus for long distances, especially in bad weather. Humboldt County has long, dark, rainy winters, with roads often blocked by fallen trees, floods or mudslides.

Besides, Frick and Wallace said, Orick School does a great job educating its students, which is reason enough to keep it open. It has an exemplary outdoor education program, with students going on regular excursions into the nearby wilderness, learning about the local flora and fauna, the seasons and forest ecosystem. They raise trout and steelhead to be released in local waterways, test water quality in the creek and watch pollywogs turn into frogs in classroom terrariums. 

Wildlife is all around them. In addition to the elk, students can observe condors and falcons soaring overhead, deer and coyotes hanging around the field and even the occasional bear. Students learn to fish, camp, raft and surf.

About half the students are Native American, and the school offers a robust education in Native traditions and history. A Yurok volunteer comes regularly to teach Yurok culture through activities such collecting acorns and making mash, and extracting pine nuts from pinecones to make beads.

“I mean, come on, how many other schools are in such an incredible setting?” Frick said. “Orick is a great place to go to school.”

This article was and was republished under the license.

Since then, many school districts have indeed announced closures, including in the communities of and, where we live and work. More, unfortunately, are on their way.

School closure announcements can elicit the worst kind of deja vu. These feelings are well-founded. Atlanta plans to shutter schools in the south and west parts of the city, which is also where overwhelmingly live and where previous closures left several buildings vacant or underutilized for years. In Philadelphia, found that achievement gains occurred only when displaced students were moved into significantly stronger schools, while peers sent to schools of similar or lower quality did not benefit and, in some cases, saw setbacks.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Districts may have to close schools for financial or performance reasons, but they don’t need to exacerbate inequities along the way. By learning from past examples, we believe it’s possible — with thoughtful, comprehensive planning and deep and broad community engagement — for school closures to serve as a new opportunity for students, families and educators. 

The first of four steps to a more constructive, less harmful closure is about stabilization. The time between when a closure is announced and when students move out of the school can produce learning loss, staff instability and family stress. 

These in-between periods are not trivial lengths of time. Students at one Philadelphia school included in the district’s January announcement will . In other words, the students who are currently in kindergarten at this school are poised to spend their entire elementary years — through fifth-grade — in a school the district has said should close due to its low enrollment and poor facilities. 

That’s a long time, especially considering students are impacted as soon as the closure is announced. found that the largest negative achievement effect occurred between the time when the closure was announced and when students actually moved to new schools. Students in schools that were being closed had scores that were lower than expected in the year of the closure: roughly in math.

To avoid this drop-off, districts can commit to maintaining through the school’s final year. They can also help reduce staff turnover by providing early clarity on placement processes, minimizing uncertainty about job security and offering retention support. 

The second step has to do with the building itself. Again, found that neighborhoods that experienced school closures led to and lower shared sense of capacity for neighbors to act together for the common good. Schools often serve as community anchors, and closing a school can make a community feel unmoored. Countering this outcome involves smart, collaborative planning to ensure buildings are invested in, not abandoned. By this measure, Philadelphia and Atlanta are off to a positive start; their closure plans include repurposing buildings for other uses, such as in Philadelphia and in Atlanta. 

The third step is about student learning, particularly ensuring students leaving a closing school can attend a higher-quality alternative. This focus shifts the conversation from the non-academic factors that often drive closure decisions — like building utilization rates and the cost to repair aging facilities — and instead centers on student learning. Administrators must ask: Which local public schools could take in displaced students without reducing the quality of their education? 

This is not a quixotic exercise. Studies from multiple cities have when students are able to transfer to demonstrably stronger schools with higher achievement levels, more experienced teachers, richer course offerings and better facilities. 

The fourth and final step is about the schools receiving new students. Especially with the months and, in many cases, years between when a closure is announced and when it takes place, there is no reason receiving schools should be caught flat-footed. These schools should have both academic and social-emotional support available for students, and districts should cap how many new students each school receives. The odds of giving individuals the support they need decrease with each additional student an institution takes in.

What we are calling for is a paradigm shift. District leaders need to begin shifting from announcing “we’ve decided to close schools” to “we’ve decided to close schools and for preventing harm and maximizing student opportunity at every stage.”

District leaders in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and elsewhere deserve credit for recognizing the trends and taking action. What’s important for these and other leaders to recognize, however, is that their work is just beginning. 

Atlanta

In a once-thriving neighborhood in the southeast part of Atlanta, Lakewood Elementary served families who came to work at the General Motors assembly plant, a sprawling 100-acre landmark that became a path toward economic mobility for entry-level workers. At its height in the late 1970s, the plant employed as many as 5,700 people. 

But by the early ‘90s, when Gloria Hawkins-Wynn moved into the community, signs of decline were evident. The last Chevy Caprice rolled off the assembly line in 1990, and a popular antique market at the now-defunct Lakewood Fairgrounds shut down in 2006. The closure of the elementary school two years earlier further contributed to neighborhood blight, turning the abandoned structure into a hotspot for criminal activity.

“We get prostitution. We get drug dealing. We get drive-by shootings,” Hawkins-Wynn told four years ago. A neighborhood representative, she urged city leaders to turn the eyesore over to a developer. 

Former students begged the city to save the school, home to some of their earliest : Dick and Jane books, dances in the auditorium, a principal named Mr. Hinkle. Still visible on the school’s deserted playground is a faded map of the United States.

“Please don’t demolish it,” wrote one woman. Walking to Lakewood with her mother, who died when she was 7, is a cherished memory. 

Now the old school is one of several in Atlanta ����’s a transformation that is increasingly taking place across the country as city leaders and developers look to give new life to vacant buildings once bustling with students and teachers.

In 2024, nearly 2,000 apartments were built in former schools across the U.S., a record high and four times the number a year earlier, according to from RentCafe, a property search website. School-to-apartment conversions are now the fastest growing segment of a niche industry devoted to makeovers of historic spaces. 

As student enrollment nationwide and more districts, including Atlanta, make the painful decision to close schools, the Lakewood project offers a glimpse of what’s to come: Seventy-four school conversion projects are already underway across the country, RentCafe’s data shows. With enrollment loss in traditional schools , districts will be left with even more surplus properties. 

Renovating existing structures “offers a way to help those buildings continue on as community assets,” said Patrice Frey, president and CEO of RePurpose Capital, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

For the first time since the Great Depression, renovation projects, including historic preservation, surpassed new construction in 2022, according to the . Supply chain gridlock and “the rapid escalation of materials costs” likely contributed to the shift, Frey said.

The pandemic also played a part as parents chose charter schools or uprooted to other districts and states to find in-person learning. The rapid expansion of private school choice has also contributed to enrollment declines, school consolidations and closures.

Data from the Brookings Institution showed that between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years, 12% of elementary schools and 9% of middle schools lost at least one-fifth of their students. Many districts delayed closures in response to parents and generations of former students who pleaded with leaders to keep the neighborhood institutions open. Some districts, , are still putting it off.

But maintaining underenrolled schools, especially those with just a couple hundred students, can be a financial drain. The , and districts are among those that have recently announced or discussed closures. That means they’ll eventually have to decide what to do with the buildings.

An earlier Atlanta project, completed in 1999, offers a preview of what’s in store for Lakewood and many other former schools. was redeveloped into Bass Lofts, a three-story structure that sits in a bohemian neighborhood known for vintage clothing stores, dive bars and record shops. Mallory Brooks, a photographer, moved into one of the units 10 years ago after relocating from Florida.

“It was the first place I looked at, and I was definitely smitten,” she said. Stepping through the main entrance, “you are transported immediately to being in a school.” 

Old lockers, welded shut, line the ground floor hallways, and a large Depression-era mural of women dancing sits above the stage in the auditorium. While rows of seats remain intact, some tenants also use the space to store their bikes. Brooks appreciates how sunlight pours through the 10-foot-high windows — “I’ve been able to basically create a greenhouse in my apartment,” she said. But regulating the temperature is difficult, and she looks forward to HVAC upgrades. 

‘Legacy residents’

Lakewood Elementary is one of eight sites that the Atlanta Public Schools is now repurposing through an agreement with the Atlanta Urban Development Corp., a nonprofit arm of the city’s housing authority that renovates historic properties into mixed-income residences. The plan, part of to increase affordable housing, includes giving teachers the first choice of apartments. That was important to Cynthia Briscoe Brown, a former Atlanta Board of Education member whose last vote in December was to . 

“Seventy percent of APS employees do not live within the city limits of Atlanta,” she said. “One of the board’s priorities in developing these properties is to make it possible for our employees to not have to drive so far before their work day.” 

A lawyer with experience in real estate, she took an interest in the dilapidated properties when she was first elected in 2013. But she also has personal ties to the site where Peeples Street Elementary, one of the eight former schools, once stood. Her father, Woodson Briscoe, attended the school, which sat just down the street from the boarding house, run by an aunt, where the family lived. 

“This was the Depression. They were a young couple with a family, and they couldn’t afford their own house,” she said. Today, as in the neighborhood climb, with some homes priced well over $500,000, families are facing the same problem. “The West End is gentrifying to a point where a lot of legacy residents are having trouble staying.” 

‘A pall over neighborhoods’ 

Peeples Street closed in 1982. has been gone for 30 years, torn down after a fire left little worth saving.

But some shuttered schools can sit vacant for decades, attracting crime and casting “a pall over neighborhoods,” Alyn Turner, a sociologist with Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, told a group of Atlanta leaders in February. 

In a hotel east of downtown, they gathered in a dining room to discuss ways to lessen the negative impacts of the upcoming closures on both students and the neighborhoods where they live.

Turner cited a showing that between 2005 and 2013, 12 urban districts, including Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh, sold, leased or repurposed 267 school properties, but still had more than 300 on the market. 

School closures “tend to concentrate in communities that have already experienced displacement and disinvestment,” she said. “People can experience a closure as yet another signal of neighborhood decline.”

In Gary, Indiana, a rising number of 911 calls near abandoned schools — an almost 600% increase between 2022 and 2024. They found fires, hundreds of requests for extra police patrols and 26 reports of “shots fired.”  In 2015, a was found dead in Emerson High School, a Four years later, three teenagers fatally shot a woman and in an emptied-out elementary school.

Like any abandoned building, a boarded-up old school can “provide cover” for criminals, according to at Arizona State University. Run-down, vacant structures can even escalate criminal behavior, they write, sending a message that no one owns or cares about the property.

Maintaining former school buildings until they’re sold or repurposed can make the neighborhood feel safer, Turner told the Atlanta group. But like Briscoe Brown, some participants said they worry about the opposite effect — gentrification that leaves some lower-income families behind.

“How can you help the people who are still there?” asked Femi Johnson, a senior director at Achieve Atlanta, a nonprofit that focuses on college access. “Can it be a food bank? Can it be a community health center?”

In her hometown of Philadelphia, she saw the former Edward Bok Vocational School, part of a wave of closures in 2013, transformed into an event space with , a destination she felt didn’t serve the community’s needs.

Developers are drawn to former schools because of their historic architectural features, like wide hallways and stairwells. The former Monsignor Coyle High School in Taunton, Massachusetts, now , boasts “soaring ceilings” and original windows. 

Tax credits for historic preservation can offset some of the costs of modernization, but come with restrictions on what developers can change and which “character-defining features,” like a gymnasium, must go untouched, said Pittsburgh developer Rick Belloli.

In 2022, his company, Q Development, Mt. Alvernia, a former Sisters of St. Francis convent and all-girls school north of Pittsburgh. He described the massive, 333-room main building, the Motherhouse, as “a gloriously spectacular historic building” with cast iron stairways and arched ceilings. But he’s still navigating the approval process, and some developers, he said, avoid former schools because of those hurdles. 

‘Choice properties’

Like Coyle and Mt. Alvernia, many of the school-to-apartment conversions are concentrated in the northeast and midwest. Columbus, Ohio, ranked first on of cities with the most school conversion projects. 

Next on the list is Cleveland, where the former Martin Luther King Jr. High School, in the predominantly Black , was among those affected by more recent enrollment loss. In 2020, the district , which had dropped to less than 350 students, and a Maryland-based developer for $880,000.

Exploring one of Cleveland’s abandoned high school’s

Last fall, knowing the building might be demolished, former students gathered to reflect and grab what mementos they could. Some cut strings off the basketball hoops, said Ronald Crosby, who attended in the late 1980s. Others took old library cards and team jerseys. 

Ronald’s sister Johnetta Crosby has fond memories of the school. “We had teachers that took their time to make sure you learned,” she said. “If you didn’t have anything to wear, they made sure you did. If you couldn’t afford to eat lunch, they fed you anyway.”

D’Angelo Dixon, who graduated in 2018, felt more conflicted. “Black stuff” leaked from the ceiling, he remembered, and academically, he felt behind friends who attended other schools. 

“Once I went to college, I felt like I didn’t know anything,” he said. But he credited the school’s career-tech program with inspiring him to work in health care. He’s now a nursing assistant. At the alumni gathering last year, he headed for the art room to grab a ceiling tile he painted with his nickname, Delo — part of a senior class assignment.

Some alumni hoped the developer, Kareem Abdus-Salaam, would save the building but that’s not part of his vision for the new residential community, a mix of apartments, townhomes and retail space.

“I really want to just level the whole site and bring it up, almost like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” he said. He expects to break ground this spring. “There are so many abandoned schools in this country that are sitting on choice properties.”

He does, however, intend to make use of the large stones that still border one corner of the property by crushing them into gravel for a quarter-mile walking trail that will wind through the development. Along that pathway, he plans to erect signposts with historical photos of the school so former students “can have some feeling of yesteryear.” 

In Atlanta, the partnership between the school district and the city gives officials a say in what the developers preserve. They’ll integrate the original Lakewood Elementary building into the overall design. 

With a strip of commercial properties on the corner, including a popular restaurant and coffee shop, Hawkins-Wynn, who still lives a few blocks away, hopes the redevelopment will spur even more investment in the neighborhood.

On a recent afternoon, the transition was obvious, but so were the obstacles in its path. As she walked the perimeter of the property, a construction crew put up plywood on a new home across the street. A few lots down, trash and discarded mattresses piled up on the curb.

“This is why we need redevelopment,” she said, pointing to the debris. “It’s still shady around here, but it’s changing like you won’t believe.” 

The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation would not have the direct authority to close public schools, and charters could keep control of their school buildings, according to a bill amendment lawmakers approved Thursday.

Under the amendment to House Bill 1423, charter authorizers and Indianapolis Public Schools — not the proposed Indianapolis Public Education Corporation — would maintain the power to close schools. But if they fail to do so, the corporation could appeal to the state board of education to close the school. The state board would ultimately have to approve the school closure.

In addition, the — introduced by Rep. Bob Behning, the Republican chair of the House Education Committee — would allow charters within IPS boundaries to opt into or out of a facility management plan overseen by the new corporation.

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The proposed changes to how school closures work and who controls buildings is part of a broader plan to change key aspects of how public schools work in the city and shift some resources from IPS to charter schools.

The amended bill clarifies that both charter authorizers and IPS must agree on a universal performance framework that could be used to determine which schools must close. in recent years, while over the last few decades.

The revised bill says IPS would still be required to cede authority over their school buildings to the corporation, and also give up power over transportation and the ability to collect and levy property taxes, to the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, or IPEC. But Behning said during House discussions Thursday that he would commit to allowing IPS to opt out of the mandate to give up control over its buildings.

Such a move could further reduce the proposed corporation’s ability to unify oversight of key aspects of how the city’s public schools work.

Shortly after that comment from Behning, IPS released a blasting how the revised bill created a carve-out for charters. The district said it created “a glaring double standard” because it would grant “charter schools the power to opt out of management and control of school property by the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation Board while denying that very same flexibility to IPS.”

Before the House discussions, Behning said his amendment came in response to concern from charter schools that paid for their buildings with private dollars. Since charters have not historically had access to property tax funding for such expenses, they have relied on other funding resources to acquire facilities.

But there would be significant consequences for charter schools that choose not to participate in facilities management, like losing capital referendum and debt service funding, and the charter school facility grant once charter schools have access to more resources, Behning said during discussions with other House lawmakers.

“If I’m a charter … I would have to figure out how I’m going to do all my operations, pay for everything out of those operating dollars, which they have never had to do,” Behning said. “I don’t really think any of them are going to do it.”

Within district borders, over 20 charter schools owned their buildings in the 2024-25 school year, while another 19 leased space and 12 operated in IPS buildings as part of the school’s Innovation Network, according to a report from the Mayor’s Office of Education Innovation.

The amendment allows charters that lease or own their buildings to decide whether to give control of the facility to IPEC. But if charters do opt out, they would not receive property tax dollars for capital needs.

During Thursday’s House discussion of the bill, Behning said his amendment didn’t outline how charter schools with privately owned buildings, or even IPS with outstanding bonds, would participate in facilities management. That’s a task for IPEC to determine in its feasibility study before assuming control of buildings in 2028-29, he said. The bill directs the new corporation to .

“If I was a charter that had privately built a building with private dollars, not with public dollars, if I want to be part of this, that’s going to be something they’re going to have to figure out,” Behning said. “My guess is, you can’t just come in and take away a private asset.”

Charters that own their buildings but are then forced to close could dispose of the building as they see fit if they don’t opt in to the corporation’s facility management plan, according to Behning. The corporation would not assume control of the building.

In theory, the new corporation would ultimately own all district buildings, Behning said. But there could be legal challenges to transferring ownership of buildings with remaining debt attached to them.

HB 1423 is eligible for a final reading in the House on Monday. If passed, it would move on to the Senate.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Hawaiʻi is expected to see the greatest decline in high school graduates in the nation over the next several years, raising concerns from lawmakers and Department of Education officials about the future of small schools in shrinking communities.

Between 2023 and 2041, Hawaiʻi could see a 33% drop in the number of students graduating from high school, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. The nation as a whole is projected to see a 10% drop in graduates, according to the commission’s , published at the end of 2024.

In 2041, public schools in the state are expected to award diplomas to just over 7,600 students, down from roughly 11,500 in 2023. Private schools are expected to see a similar drop in their graduating senior classes over the same time frame.

Already, the education department has seen its enrollment drop by nearly 12% over the past decade, with school leaders citing the state’s declining birth rate and the number of families leaving Hawaiʻi in recent years.

Last year, the department discussed the possibility of , with some lawmakers and school leaders arguing that it was financially unsustainable to keep small campuses open. But the department changed course last fall, proposing a  to avoid closures.

Closing schools is a controversial and slow process. The department hasn’t closed a school since 2011, when it received strong pushback from families and community members around its decision to shutter Queen Liliʻuokalani Elementary School in Kaimukī.

Now, some lawmakers want to force the department to take swifter action.  introduced last week by Sen. Troy Hashimoto would establish an independent commission to review school facilities and recommend the consolidation, closure or realignment of schools.

“Decades of enrollment growth led to the construction of new campuses, but the recent and continuing decline in student numbers has left many facilities underutilized,” the bill states, adding that Hawaiʻi is facing more financial constraints amid possible federal cuts.

The bill requires the commission to submit its findings to the Legislature and the governor by fall 2027. If lawmakers and the governor approve the findings, DOE would be required to implement the commission’s recommendations following the 2028 legislative session.

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy, and “Data Dive” is supported in part by the Will J. Reid Foundation.

The head of the Philadelphia City Council Education Committee says he disagrees with parts of , kicking off what may become a fraught conflict over which schools are ultimately shuttered.

The district said Thursday that nearly 5,000 students will have their schools closed in the coming years. Along with closures, the plan includes co-locating and relocating several schools and modernizing some school buildings, shuffling where many students go to school across the city.

But Councilmember Isaiah Thomas said he would “never support” closing one of the schools on the district’s list — Conwell Middle School — and has major questions about the district’s plan for several others.

Other officials urged the district to be transparent with schools and make sure students and families are supported. A spokesperson for Mayor Cherelle Parker said she was not available to comment. And union leaders said they needed more time and more information to determine whether or not they support it.

The reactions that began to trickle out Thursday will set the stage for what will likely become months of tense discussions and negotiations over what could be a jarring transformation for Philadelphia schools. District leaders say the plan would improve academics and use resources more efficiently and .

Members of the Board of Education, who were nominated by Parker, will review the plan at next month’s board meeting. The plan must be approved by the board, although Thomas and other city officials could use their political influence to complicate the plan’s path forward, or change it.

Though school leaders have said for months that closures were coming, the timing of the news still shocked many educators and families. Whispers of a list of schools the district plans to close began to spread Tuesday and Wednesday. Meetings and protests about the plan are likely to happen early and often.

Outside of Motivation High School in West Philadelphia Thursday afternoon, students said they had learned their school was closing during a meeting in the school’s auditorium earlier in the day.

“I pray it doesn’t happen,” said Journee Tucker, 16.

The district wants Motivation to merge into Bartram High School as an honors program beginning in the 2027-28 school year. The Motivation building is slated to be repurposed as district swing space.

But Tucker said she worried that Bartram is “too chaotic.” This year, it has nearly 600 students enrolled — four times the size of Motivation.

If the plan goes through, she said her mom has already said she would attend a different high school than Bartram.

“����’s going to be a mess,” Tucker said. “I just don’t see the point.”

Councilmember wants to protect Conwell Middle School from closure

Thomas’ reaction stood out Thursday, in part because several elected officials did not say if they were for or against the plan, or comment on specifics. Others weren’t available for comment.

Thomas is an influential voice in the city’s education system, and has been a proponent of several charter schools.

Thomas said he immediately disagreed with parts of the plan — especially the district’s plan to close Russell Conwell Middle School, which he attended.

“If you’re a Philly person, you understand,” he said, adding that the school’s strong alumni network and culture is a huge benefit to the community.

The school, which is in a 100-year-old building in the city’s Kensington neighborhood, is one of several middle schools the district plans to close.

Thomas said he also disagreed with the district’s plan to merge students from Parkway Northwest High School into Martin Luther King High School, and turn Parkway Northwest into an honors program in the school.

Thomas said he also did not understand how the district expects to expand Ellwood from a K-5 school to a K-8 school while the school is already nearing capacity.

“I’m not looking to completely blow anything up or anything like that,” Thomas said of the plan. “There are some things that I agree with, there are some things I have a few more questions about, and then there are a few things that I disagree with.”

Union leadership says school closures would be ‘devastating’

District leadership has said no teachers will lose their jobs as a result of the closures, and teachers at schools that close will help fill vacancies elsewhere.

Still, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg said Thursday the news has been “devastating and disheartening” for staff.

Steinberg said he could not comment on whether he supported the plan until the district shares more information on how they arrived at their decision. During community engagement events last year, . But it did not explain how those factors would influence decisions.

“����’s like they took all these ingredients, threw them into a blender, and came out with a finished product,” Steinberg said.

Ultimately, Steinberg said he is never an advocate for closing a school. But he said he understood that the district has had years of “chronic disinvestment” and needs to address its .

Robin Cooper, president of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators which represents principals and other school staff, said she appreciated the district’s efforts to survey staff and families for feedback about facilities before announcing the plan.

But she said she still worries closures will be problematic for school communities and create uncertainty for many school staff.

“I understand the superintendent has a job to do, and I don’t think that he did it lightly,” Cooper said. “I just think it’s a no-good situation all the way around.”

Families, teachers worry school closures will be damaging

In West Philadelphia, Rhemar Pouncey is worried about what will happen to her grandson if Overbrook Elementary School closes.

In the district’s proposal, Overbrook students will be reassigned to four other neighborhood schools, and the building will be repurposed as district network offices.

Pouncey called the school “a family and a community in itself,” referencing staff who know students by name, as well as food and gift drives organized by the neighbors.

“I do not concern myself with sending my grandson to Overbrook Elementary, because I know he’ll be safe,” Pouncey said. “I know when he gets dropped off that he has an extended group of aunties and uncles.”

The district has said it will create a transportation plan for students whose schools change, but has not released more details.

Pouncey said she worries about her son walking through “danger zones” in the neighborhood to get to another school.

About two dozen schools have a that hires adults to patrol school perimeters and sometimes walk children home after school. Separately the City of Philadelphia runs a to escort students before and after the school day.

“What’s going to happen if one of our kids gets shot or gets killed because you close down the closest school to them, for them to have to go all the way to John Barry, or all the way to Bluford?” Pouncey said.

Several teachers said the district had forbidden them from talking to the press about the plan.

One teacher at Lankenau Environmental Science High School, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said the entire school was taken aback to hear the school would be closed and turned into a magnet program at Roxborough High School.

Much of the school’s programming, she said, relies on its location. It organizes a beekeeping and honey collection event with a community partner, for example, that can only happen at the site. And it has other programming connected to a neighboring environmental education center.

“If you’re just talking about buildings, and you’re looking at children as numbers, then, yeah, this is what you do,” the teacher said. “But when you look at the actual educational programming and closing a site like Lankenau, it doesn’t work. You won’t be able to pick the program up and put it into Roxborough.”

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OKLAHOMA CITY — A state board governing charter schools has decided it’s seen enough from Proud To Partner Leadership Academy and voted Monday to “pull the plug” on the school.

The Statewide Charter School Board made the rare decision to issue a notice of termination to the charter high school in southwest Oklahoma City. Seven board members voted in favor and two abstained.

The decision sets in motion the process of closing the school once the current academic year ends and voiding its charter contract. The 100 students attending the school, known as PTPLA, then would have to return to their neighborhood school districts or find another educational option.

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The board placed PTPLA over financial, operational and academic quality concerns. Members of the state board from the school’s leadership.

“That’s what we always ask for is a spirit of cooperation and desire to work together to improve the outcomes at the school,” board Chairperson Brian Shellem said after Monday’s meeting. “As it continued to progress, it seemed like it got harder and harder.”

State officials said they still had more questions than answers after three months of probation and multiple meetings with PTPLA.

The board’s staff made three visits to the school this fall and reported seeing only one teacher giving instruction. .

Rebecca Wilkinson, executive director of the state board, said she observed students with a computer open but not logged in, others not completing any work, seven who were sleeping or had their heads down, and some who were unable to say what course or topic they were studying, all of which raised concerns about the school’s educational quality.

PTPLA, which opened in 2024, faced scrutiny over weak finances, as well. It laid off four teachers in October and finished the previous school year in a budget deficit.

State officials also complained of missed deadlines and other unfulfilled obligations by the school’s administration.

“My opinion is it’s time to pull the plug,” statewide board member William Pearson said before the vote. “����’s time to move to termination.”

Despite the school’s struggles, PTPLA leaders told the state

School founder and Superintendent Dawn Bowles said her students now face the prospect of returning to “schools that were not serving them in the first place.”

“Our next feat will be, what is our next move to make sure that we don’t drop the ball on the ones that we’ve committed to serving,” Bowles said. “We will continue to serve them. We will continue to educate them. We will continue to provide opportunities outside of education, and we will continue to be their village as we move forward because this is what we consider to be the greater way.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

Launched in 2008, MC²STEM attracted the city’s best students to classrooms in locations ranging from Cleveland’s science museum, the world headquarters of GE Lighting, and at a local community and a commuter college. 

The small school with an enrollment of 218 students even caught the eye of former President Barack Obama, who included it in a 2014 slideshow with the caption: “We need more schools like: MC²STEM High School.”

But next fall, as part of away from the small schools model that was once popular nationally, MC²STEM won’t exist anymore. Instead, it’s being turned into just a STEM program at a high school in the poorest neighborhood in the city.

The school is the most dramatic casualty in a major reorganization and reduction of schools in Cleveland as ever-declining enrollment forces budget cuts. The cuts come as the district also changes its philosophy from highlighting a few star high schools to keep strong students from fleeing, instead shifting toward offering more opportunities at all high schools. 

“I kind of see this as an ending for the school that I knew,” said Feowyn McKinnon, the school’s principal from 2015 to 2021, who believes turning MC²STEM into a program inside a standard school will damage it.

With the cuts, Cleveland is reversing the once-popular movement in districts across the country of carving up big schools into smaller schools that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his foundation once promoted and funded. Cleveland adopted the small schools approach heavily in the early 2000’s as well as the similar “portfolio” school district model that downplays large, standardized schools in favor of offering students a choice of many schools with different approaches. 

But the tide has turned against the small schools movement with and Cleveland now facing both budget troubles and a desire to make schools big enough to offer more language electives and career training classes.

Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education that , said districts shifted away from small, specialized schools to save money before the pandemic, then moved further from the model by seeking standardized ways to recover.  

“I don’t think it’s an educational decision so much as just the financial pressures on districts to find ways to keep operating,” he said. “As everybody gets bled out of money, one way to do that is to eliminate an administrative layer from a school and call it a program. I don’t think people have come to the conclusion that great big schools are better than smaller ones.”

In Cleveland, the school board is expected to vote Dec. 9 to fold 27 high schools, many of them small specialized schools of fewer than 300 students, into 14 large comprehensive high schools. 

If the plan passes, several specialized high schools — including MC²STEM, two early college high schools, two schools that teach medicine by partnering with hospitals; and an aviation and maritime school helping students earn pilot licenses — will all become programs within large combined schools.

Along with closing 16 preK-8 schools, the changes are estimated to save about $30 million a year by slashing administrative and building costs.

Cleveland district CEO Warren Morgan has cast the changes as a matter of both money and equity after cutting extra school days and year-round classes at several schools.

“Right now, we have pockets of excellence,” said Morgan. “We have some schools that have programs, some that don’t. We offer some things at some schools, but we don’t offer them at others. Now is a time for us to figure out what we can do for all. Not for some, but for all.”

Part of Morgan’s goal is efficiency. The district, like others in older and Rust Belt cities, has been losing students for years. The Cleveland school district had 115,000 students in 1979 before several factors — court-ordered busing to integrate schools, white flight, suburbanization, creation of one of the country’s first voucher programs and then the growth of charter schools — cut enrollment to about 34,000 today.

Though the district has closed buildings several times over the years, it now estimates schools have space for 50,000 students — about 16,000 too many.

Former district CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who had been involved in creating small schools in New York City and later became CEO of Chicago schools, Then longtime CEO Eric Gordon, who ran the district from 2011 to 2023, aggressively created small high schools with distinct themes, ranging from project-based schools to one built around students creating digital artwork, music or video games.

That gave Cleveland many small high schools with fewer than 300 students, each with the costs of their own principals and other support staff, but not enough students to justify always having sports teams, Advanced Placement classes, foreign language options and — as a recent focus of the district and state — full career pathways that let students earn valuable career credentials.

Morgan now wants all high schools to have at least 500 students and promises to add career training teachers and classes so that all schools can offer career pathways recognized by the state.

����’s why the 218 student MC²STEM is merging into the 475 student East Technical High School, and why the district is undoing a major that split the old, large John Hay High School in the early 2000’s into three magnet schools that now have 211, 259 and 375 students. They’ll all be turned into programs next fall of a re-combined school that will also add a fourth 207-student high school to the mix. 

The changes could have drawbacks. The magnet schools at John Hay have been district leaders in test scores and college enrollment for years and have been a significant draw to families, particularly the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine, which has students learning from staff of the nearby Cleveland Clinic, University Hospital and Case Western Reserve University medical school.

Morgan pledges to maintain those partnerships, though whether becoming a program instead of remaining its own school will be just a bookkeeping change or whether it will dilute the program remains to be seen.

Students aren’t sure yet about the changes. 

Ruby Love, a freshman at the School of Science and Medicine where 375 students are enrolled, said it mattered that her school was focused on medicine when she chose it. She’s not excited about having the three schools mix next year.

 “It’s going to be weird being in classes with people I’ve never met,” she said.

At the same time, her school offers only Latin as a second language and the merger could let her take Spanish, or even engineering classes.

Eri’elle Jones, another Science and Medicine student, also likes the possibility of taking Spanish so the change has some appeal.

“I don’t have an issue with it,” she said. “It gives you a lot more opportunities”

Bekah Lejarde, a teacher at another small high school that will be merged into two others, said smaller schools help students and opposes combining the three into a 1,400-student school. The three schools already share the John Marshall High School, but their distinct themes and personalized approach has boosted graduation rates in the 10 years since opening. 

She told the school board that the merger might save the district $250,000, at most.

“Is that amount of money worth a declining graduation rate?” Lejarde asked. “Is $250,000 worth a diminished learning environment, less support, increased safety issues and an easier ability for scholars to fall through the cracks?”

Another merging school, the Benjamin O. Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School, is cautiously hopeful its program — started to prepare students for careers in aviation and Great Lakes shipping — will stay strong and maintain a distinct identity. An industry non-profit called Argonaut that helped start the school in 2017 wants “aerospace” and “maritime” to stay in the name, even as it merges with a digital arts school.

“The two sides of the name are: One is getting buy-in from industries. As this is a school specifically about these industries,you know we’re connecting to the jobs,” said Andrew Ferguson, CEO of Argonaut, who is at the school constantly, taking students onto Lake Erie on boats or helping them with flight lessons. “The other is getting kids to show up at the door. When you go to a school called aerospace and maritime, you’re pretty clear what the expectation is and where you’re going.”

Critics of the changes agree with Morgan that the district needs to close schools, because some of the specialized schools can be expensive. As protective as McKinnon is about MC²STEM, she conceded having duplicate teachers at the school’s multiple sites is costly, along with the $80,000 she recalls the school spending on parking at the science museum and at Cleveland State University each year.

The former crown jewel school has also lost some of its shine. Test scores fell to the middle of the pack in recent years as the district added more specialty schools and the best students picked other options. 

“If money is the issue that schools are closing, it 100% makes sense that MC² is closing,” she said. “There were always so many additional expenses related to MC² that every year I thought we were on the chopping block.” 

Cleveland Teachers Union President Shari Obrenski agreed some schools need to close, but worried that the district is rushing the changes for next school year without carefully planning how combining the schools will work..

“When you take a building where you have these schools that have been ranked not only highly in the district, but in the state, and then you’re just going to kind of blow it up without an idea of how you’re putting it back together, that’s concerning,” Obrenski said. “I don’t really want to be building this plane while we’re flying it.” 

West Virginia schools continue to lose students, a continuing problem that has contributed to a wave of proposed school closures and consolidations around the state. 

State Schools Superintendent Michele Blatt said schools have lost 2.5% of their students in the past year.

The state’s enrollment is now 234,957 students for this current school year, Blatt shared on Wednesday during a state Board of Education meeting.

“Fifty-three of 55 of our districts did decrease in enrollment this year,” Blatt said, noting only Tyler and Doddridge counties had an increase in student population.

A new West Virginia enrollment showed a 6.5% decline from when the state had 250,899 students in the 2021-22 school year.

School officials have pointed to the state’s ongoing population decline as a major reason for the enrollment drop.

“There’s declining enrollment in our state as a whole and that’s affecting our school systems,” Blatt said.

West Virginia experienced decline in the nation from 2020 to 2024, a time period that included the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Multiple school districts school closures or consolidations this year. Last week, the Roane County Board of Education two elementary and middle schools at the end of the 2025-26 school year. The county plans to consolidate students into other nearby schools. The state Board of Education will have to approve the plan. 

Roane County School Board President Jeff Mace said funding was part of the problem, MetroNews . He said the state’s school funding formula needs to be modernized and should focus more on the needs of students rather than student enrollment.

“I believe if we don’t invest in our education, we’re just going to continue to drive all of our young people and our young talent out of the state and we’re going to prevent people from coming in,” Mace said. 

State school board President Paul Hardesty has already to fix the school funding formula during the next legislative session to prevent more school closures in the rural state. 

According to the state Department of Education, 16 public schools closed in 2024.

Micah Whitlow, director of the West Virginia Department of Education’s Office of School Facilities, said that counties are making these decisions “based on real problems.”

“These things aren’t done on a whim or they just woke up one day thinking about this. Some of them are staff shortages, finances, deteriorating facilities. Some of these it’s all those things together,” he said.

Expired pandemic relief funding and students opting out of public schools to use the state’s broad school voucher program – – have also put a financial strain on public schools. Around 19,000 students are using the voucher program this school year, typically at private religious schools. 

The enrollment report showed that public schools served 477 students using the Hope Scholarship; students using the Hope program can pay to take public school classes. Public schools also served 1,336 Hope Scholarship students that were not funded, according to the report. 

More than 4,000 children are attending virtual schools, which are considered public schools in West Virginia. Most of those students are enrolled in virtual charter schools. The state’s number of charter students has increased since the 2023-24 school year when 2,270 were enrolled.

Overall, most West Virginia students continue to be served in public schools as leaders grapple with financial issues, which can lead to .

“We can say that 98.2% of our students are still served in our public schools,” Blatt said. 

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

The Minneapolis school board has formally asked Superintendent Dr. Lisa Sayles-Adams for information that could lead to school closures. They passed a resolution to the effect at a recent .

The board first drafted the directive —which asks for an initial report to the board by April 2026 — at two day-long meetings in June and August. The planning follows years of discussion about closing schools in a district with 29,000 students but the capacity for 42,000 and thus a bevy of half-empty schools.

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Even as enrollment declines at a school building, the fixed expenses for building staff — like principals, secretaries, nurses, librarians, culinary workers, custodians and social workers — stay the same or go up. With so many buildings below capacity, a big portion of each Minneapolis student’s funding has to go toward covering these fixed building-level costs, draining money away from instruction and extracurricular activities.

The board resolution comprises topics for district administrators to investigate, including efficient use of current buildings, potential changes to magnet programs, and ways to increase enrollment in the district.

Years-long discussion about the financial burden of operating small enrollment schools

The process for downsizing the district’s footprint has been long and circuitous.

In, the district prepared a comprehensive financial assessment forecasting that without significant cost cutting, the district would end up draining its reserves, while expenses would exceed revenues by the end of fiscal year 2026. The district has avoided that fate by cutting services and raising class sizes, but it is still unable to balance its budget without relying on reserves and other one-time funds.

The 2022 memo did not prescribe closing schools, but it did present an analysis showing enrollment growth alone could not overcome the district’s structural inefficiencies resulting from operating many schools with small enrollments. At the time of the analysis, Anoka-Hennepin was operating 37 school buildings while enrolling about 37,000 students. Minneapolis was operating 61 buildings while enrolling about 29,000 students. Minneapolis had about half as many students per building as Anoka-Hennepin.

The board first publicly discussed reducing the number of schools in March 2023, when asked Rochelle Cox, the then-interim superintendent, to develop a draft plan for “school transformation.” Neither Cox nor the board took action.

Two months before current Superintendent Dr. Lisa Sayles-Adams started at the district in early 2024, the School Board passed a “transformation resolution” that directed the district to do an accounting of physical space but stopped short of calling for a timeline on school closures.

Sayle-Adams after passing a budget in June 2024, because, she said, the community asked her to address the issue.

Low enrollment schools require more funding per student for building-level staff

The district is contending with rising costs and operating a significant number of small buildings, as well as buildings operating below capacity. Given the rising fixed costs of operating these buildings, that leaves less money for everything else, from class size reduction to teacher pay and programs commonly found in most school districts like world languages, art, music and athletics.

Across the district, as building-level enrollment has declined, students have lost access to services like academic support if they’re struggling; staff to address student behavior; and community liaisons to help parents connect with schools. Small elementary schools have difficulty funding full-time positions for electives like art, music and gym, while hiring part-time staff for these positions is challenging. Some elementary students have gone without these electives, or only have music or art for part of the school year.

Enrollment declines at middle and high schools have meant fewer elective options, like world languages, dance, theater and orchestra, as well as extracurriculars. Students also lose access to advanced coursework — like AP or IB classes — when there are too few students in the school who want to enroll. Many of the district’s high schools are now sharing athletic teams because individual schools lack enough students and funding to support a robust athletics program.

The decline in services drives some families to schools outside the district that have the services and programs they desire, compounding the enrollment declines.

Declines in enrollment mitigated by new-to-country students

Minneapolis Public Schools in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, due to a combination of factors including implementing a controversial plan redrawing school boundaries, and keeping its schools closed longer during the pandemic than any other Minnesota district, which was followed in March 2022 by a three week educator strike.

The district has enjoyed a small enrollment increase both last year and this year. Although the district does not track the immigration status of students, the increase has been almost entirely to students newly arrived to the United States from Central America. Since the 2021-22 school year, English learner students have increased from 17% of the district’s students to 23% in the 2024-25 school year, according to Minnesota Department of Education data.

This year, the district expects to spend at least $17 million more on English learner services than it receives in funding from state and federal sources. Although the Legislature increased state aid for English learners during the 2023 legislative session, the district’s funding is insufficient to cover the cost of providing the intensive services needed by students with the lowest levels of English proficiency.

Many of the newcomer students are also unhoused, which has led to growing costs for the district to transport students from shelters outside district boundaries, as required under the federal McKinney-Vento law. The state has started to pay the cost of this transportation under a law passed in 2023.

It is not clear whether changes to federal immigration policy will impact the district’s ability to continue to rely on newcomers to stabilize or grow enrollment in the future.

Future enrollment expected to decline, limiting district’s funding

Hazel Reinhardt, a demographer hired by the district, says enrollment is in the coming years because of lower birth rates, fewer families choosing to raise children in the city, and the state’s favorable laws around charter schools and open enrollment, allowing parents to send their children to St. Paul or suburban schools.

Reinhardt told the board in that once parents leave for charter and private schools or open enrollment options, “precious few” districts are able to bring them back.

Most of the district’s funding is based on enrollment, so declining enrollment has created a . Growing costs for both labor and services have outpaced increases in state and local funding.

The district continues to cut services, increase class sizes and pull from its dwindling reserve funds to balance its annual budget. The district is expected to use $25 million from its reserves this school year after using $85 million from reserves last school year.

The district’s enrollment woes and related financial distress are not unique to Minneapolis, with similar challenges facing large urban districts like , , , and . Denver and have closed a small number of schools in recent years, but not enough to stabilize district finances. And school boards in Seattle and have walked away from closure plans after significant public pressure, leaving both districts with growing budget deficits.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.

“ board votes to close 13 school buildings.”

“ to close 7 schools, cut grades at 3 others despite heavy resistance.”

“: These are the SFUSD schools facing closure.” 

Such reports can leave the impression that districts are rapidly closing schools in response to declining enrollment and families leaving for charters, private schools and homeschooling. 

But the data tells a different story. 

School closures have actually declined over the past decade, a period of financial instability that only increased in the aftermath of the pandemic, according to research from the Brookings Institution. 

The , shared exclusively with The 74, shows that in 2014-15, the closure rate — the share of schools nationwide that were open one year and closed the next — was 1.3%. In 2023-24, the rate was just .8%, up from .7% the year before.

“I think it’s important for people to realize how rare school closures are,” said Sofoklis Goulas, a Brookings fellow and the study’s author. 

Last fall, showed how schools that have lost at least 20% of their enrollment since the pandemic are more likely to be low-performing. The Clark County Public Schools, which includes Las Vegas, had the most schools on the list — 19 — but isn’t currently considering closures. In Philadelphia, with 12 schools in that category, district leaders are to discuss closures.

When it released Goulas’s initial report, of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute argued that low-performing schools should be the first to close. But efforts to do so are often met with pushback from families, teachers and advocacy groups who argue that shutting down schools unfairly harms poor and minority students and contributes to neighborhood blight. Their pleas often push district leaders to retreat. Working in advocates’ favor, experts say, is the fact that many big district leaders are untested and have never had to navigate the emotionally charged waters of closing schools.

“Closing a neighborhood school is probably one of the most difficult decisions a district’s board makes,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a California state agency that provides financial oversight to districts. “They are going to avoid that decision as long as they can and at all costs.” 

Such examples aren’t hard to find:

• Just weeks after announcing closures, the San Francisco district to shutter any schools this fall.

• In September, outgoing Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez pledged to for another two years, even though state law allows the city to take action sooner. The district is in the process of absorbing to keep them from closing. 

• In October, Pittsburgh Public Schools ; several others were set to be relocated and reconfigured. About a month later, Superintendent Wayne Walters hit pause, saying the district needed more “thoughtful planning” and community input.

• Last May, the Seattle Public Schools it would shutter 20 elementary schools next school year in response to a $100 million-plus budget deficit. They later increased the number to 21. By October, the list had dwindled to four schools. Just before Thanksgiving, Superintendent Brent Jones entirely. 

“This decision allows us to clarify the process, deepen our understanding of the potential impacts, and thoughtfully determine our next steps,” to families. While the plan would have saved the district $5.5 million, he said, “These savings should not come at the cost of dividing our community.”

Graham Hill Elementary in Seattle, which fifth grader Wren Alexander has attended since kindergarten, was initially on the list. The Title I school sits on top of a hill in a desirable area overlooking Lake Washington. But it also draws students from the lower-income, highly diverse Brighton Park neighborhood.

Among Wren’s neighbors are students from Ethiopia, Vietnam and Guatemala. Wren, who moves on to middle school this fall, said she looks forward to visiting her former teachers and cried when she heard Graham Hill might close. She wanted her younger brother and sister to develop the same warm connection she had.

“I don’t think I would be who I am if I didn’t go to the school,” she said.

Tricia Alexander, her mother, was among those who opposed the closures, participating in outside the district’s administration building and before board meetings.

“We were really loud,” said Alexander, who’s also part of , an effort to advocate for more state education funding. She said there was “no real evidence” that closing schools would have solved the district’s budget woes. “In no way would kids win.”

����’s shared by many school finance experts, who note that the bulk of school funding is tied up in salaries, not facility costs. Districts may save some money from closing schools, but unless coupled with staff reductions, it’s often not enough to make up for large budget shortfalls.  

‘So bad at this’

If enrollment doesn’t pick up, experts say, leaders who delay closures will have to confront the same issues a year later or — perhaps even more likely — pass the problems on to their successors. 

“If there continues to be fewer and fewer children …then that doesn’t get better,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant.  

One Chicago high school, for example, had just last year. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, 34 elementary schools have fewer than 200 students and 29 of those are using less than half of the building, according to a recent . The share of U.S. students being educated outside of traditional schools also continues to increase, according to a forthcoming analysis Goulas conducted with researchers at Yale University. 

“We don’t see a trajectory of enrollment recovery,” he said. “Things actually got worse in the most recently released data batch.”

But such conditions haven’t stopped advocacy groups from campaigning against closures. One of them, the left-leaning Advancement Project, has joined with local groups in Denver and Pittsburgh to make a case against closures nationally. 

“All children deserve to have a local, neighborhood public school in which they and their families have a say,” said Jessica Alcantara, senior attorney for the group’s Opportunity to Learn program. “����’s not just that school closures are hard on families. They harm the full education ecosystem that makes up a school — students, families, school staff and whole communities.”   

Last May, Alcantara and other Advancement Project staff urged the U.S. Department of Education to treat school closures as a civil rights issue. Nine of the 10 schools the Denver district in 2022 had a majority Black or Hispanic student population. 

The advocates argued that in cases of enrollment loss, run-down facilities and empty classrooms, there are alternatives to closing schools. They to push for renovations and urge district leaders to use vacant spaces for STEM, arts or other programs that might attract families. Opponents of closures also say that districts sometimes underestimate how much of a building is used for non-classroom purposes like special education services, early-childhood programs and mental health. 

Eschbacher’s assessment of why districts often back down from closing schools is more blunt. 

“Districts are so bad at this,” he said. “If you just do a few things wrong, it could sink the whole effort.”

For one, leaders often target schools with under 300 students for closure, appealing to parents that they can’t afford to staff them with arts programs, a school nurse or a librarian. 

But those explanations sometimes fall flat.

“Parents always say, ‘I wanted a small school. I know my teachers and they know my kid. And it’s right down the street,’” Eschbacher said. If they didn’t like their school, he added, they would have likely would have chosen a charter or some other option. 

District officials also run into trouble if they try to spin the data. When Seattle officials talked about “right-sizing” the district, to the loss of 4,900 students since 2019-20. 

But Albert Wong, a parent in the district and a lifelong Seattle resident, knew there was more to the story. Not only is the current enrollment higher than it was from 2000 to 2011, the pandemic-related decline seems to have . In a , he argued that officials presented misleading data “to make current enrollment look exceptionally bad.”

Graham Hill Elementary, fifth-grader Wren’s school, actually saw a slight increase in enrollment this year, including a new class for preschoolers with disabilities. And while Pittsburgh schools are another 5,000 students over the next six years, enrollment this year held steady at .

To Eschbacher, the “burden of proof is always on the district” to make an airtight case for why students would be better off in larger schools. He has applauded the Denver-area Jeffco Public Schools, which has schools since 2021, for having , not just district officials, explain population trends to families at community meetings.

‘It wasn’t realistic’

Walters, Pittsburgh’s superintendent, can easily rattle off reasons why the district should rethink how it uses its buildings. Early last year, showed that almost half of the district’s schools were less than 50% full. 

“We’ve lost about a fourth of our population, but we have not changed anything to our footprint,” he said. 

Meanwhile, the average age of the district’s buildings is 90 years old, and many lack , forcing some schools to send students home in sweltering weather.

But a consulting group’s showed that Black and low-income students and those with disabilities would be disproportionately affected by the changes. Several drew attention to those disparities, calling  the effort “rushed.” 

Walters agreed and put the plan on hold last fall, saying he lacked “robust” responses to parents’ tough questions about how schools would change for their kids.

“It doesn’t mean that we don’t see a path forward,” he said. “But it wasn’t realistic that we would have those questions answered within the timeline that we’ve been given.”

In March, parents pushed for , causing the school board to postpone a vote on the next phase in the closure process.

As the Jeffco district demonstrates, some school systems are following through with closures. The school board in nearby Denver unanimously voted in November to close seven schools and downsize three more. 

But that’s after community protests pushed the district to put on a plan to close 19 schools in 2021. Advocates argued that families in low-income areas, who had been heavily impacted by the pandemic, would be most affected. Then the district only in 2023, and now board members are considering on closures for three years.

School boards closing a dozen or more schools are often catching up with work their predecessors let pile up, said Goulas of Brookings. 

“Closing a single school allows for easier placement of students and minimizes the political cost and community stress,” he said. “When a district releases a long list of schools to close, it likely indicates that they waited for conditions to improve, but this didn’t happen.”

Angel Gober, executive director of 412 Justice — one of 16 organizations that called on the Pittsburgh district to drop its plan — acknowledged that their fight isn’t over.

“I think we got a temporary blessing from God,” she said. But she wants the district to explore a host of alternatives, like community schools and corporate support, before it shutters and sells off buildings. “We do have very old infrastructure, and that is an equity issue. But can we try five things before we make a drastic decision to close schools for forever?”

In early 2020, the findings suggested that children were essentially unaffected by the virus and minimally contagious when they caught it. He envisioned a magazine piece arguing for reopening schools, and began pitching it to major outlets. 

No one was interested.

Eventually, WIRED agreed to run it, and as he reported it, the evidence only seemed to build. In New York City, out of more than 14,000 deaths at the time were reported in people under 18. He remembers thinking: “This is a major, major story.” As the magazine took its time with edits, he was in a panic, “waiting to get scooped” by other media. 

It never happened.

He soon realized that most major outlets had little curiosity about the science — or lack of it — underlying COVID remediations. 

His piece, , appeared in mid-May and instantly went viral. But its premise — that the U.S. was following “a divergent path” on reopening — got lost in the larger debate swirling in major media. And Zweig, a former magazine fact-checker who had always entertained the notion that health authorities and journalists in legacy media took science seriously, began to wonder what he’d missed.

A year later, with his two kids still not back to school full time despite mountains of evidence that it could be done safely, his sense of who the “good guys” were had been thoroughly shaken. Social isolation, masking and hybrid schooling were taking an enormous toll on his kids and millions of others nationwide, even as most schools in Europe opened early and stayed open, often without the dogged reliance on masking and distancing that American schools employed.

“The sense that all of this suffering for them and millions of other kids was for naught consumed me,” he writes. “I could not silence the voice in my head that this was gravely stupid.”

By 2021, he was testifying as an expert witness before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on reopening schools, as well as a House subcommittee on the pandemic.

Five years after the first school closures, Zweig’s third book, An Abundance of Caution, out Tuesday, looks back on what he considers the questionable deliberations surrounding COVID at almost every level. While it takes the pandemic as its subject, Zweig notes that the book is about something much broader: “a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.”

He finds bad decisions everywhere, with experts basing assertions about the virulence of the virus on that themselves were based essentially on guesswork. ���Ķ���vlog outlets, he alleges, routinely overhyped the seriousness of the virus, despite that children were not major carriers — and schools .

The media perseverated on the effectiveness of remedies like masking, social distancing and isolation, Zweig finds, despite that any of them made a difference. For months, they credulously transcribed experts’ predictions, often relying on the loudest, most overwrought voices, who often brought questionable credentials to the task. In one instance, an expert quoted on reopening was actually a consultant for smokeless tobacco companies.

Lawmakers dropped the ball as well, he says, prioritizing — perhaps even fetishizing — ”safety” over normalcy, even when there was little evidence for keeping schools closed beyond the few weeks in which public health experts urged Americans to “flatten the curve” of COVID cases.

Zweig has found a receptive audience for his reporting on the center-right — the book this week was excerpted in the conservative online publication — but his work has also bolstered arguments in left-of-center publications, from and to and .

Ahead of the book’s publication, Zweig spoke to The 74’s Greg Toppo, further exploring its themes of a false medical consensus amid America’s “uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment.”

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

By May 2020, schools in The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more than a dozen other nations had reopened, with evidence mounting that COVID wasn’t even a modest risk to children. At a European Union conference, researchers reported that reopening schools there brought no significant increase in infections. Why weren’t we in lockstep with Europe? 

That is a very good question, which I spend 500 pages discussing [Laughs]. I’m saying that jokingly, but I’m not joking. The answer to that is long and complex. A uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment in America is one large reason. It’s not the only reason, but it is a significant reason.

You bemoan the politics surrounding the pandemic, but in one instance you quote on mitigation efforts. Early on, in March 2020, he  talked about wanting to act aggressively. DeWine invoked the example of St. Louis, which did so in the and had a death rate of just 358 per 100,000 people, while Philadelphia was slower to respond and suffered 748 deaths per 100,000. “We all want to be St Louis,” he said. Part of me wonders: What’s wrong with that? Motivating people to not be the bad example makes sense, doesn’t it? 

The example that so many politicians and so many media outlets used from the 1918 pandemic, where they often compared St. Louis to Philadelphia, was a deeply flawed misunderstanding of what the data actually showed over time. This was a misrepresentation and misunderstanding about what school closures can actually accomplish over time.

What’s the basic flaw in that approach?

A core flaw in the entire pandemic response, and in particular school closures, was the assumption that everyone was going to remain home and sequestered from each other for a lengthy period of time. While these interventions could be effective for a week or maybe two weeks or so, over time there is no way of effectively stopping the spread of a highly contagious respiratory virus in a free society, and in particular a society as economically and professionally stratified as America.

From the beginning, a significant portion of people in our country continued to move about because they had to. So while the laptop class sat home, and their children were home in a comfortable room, possibly aided by tutors or maybe a pod teacher, or maybe they were in private school, a significant portion of our country were delivering food and goods and other services from warehouses and restaurants and  slaughterhouses to the wealthier Americans who sat at home on Zoom. 

This was one of the most class-based, inequality-thrust decisions in our recent history. And to make matters worse is the idea which was continually perpetuated, that if you didn’t comply, that you were immoral, that there was a tremendous amount of virtue attached to the notion of staying home. Yet a significant portion of society could never comply with that. Beyond professional obligations, there are many millions of children who live in homes that are not safe, that are not conducive to being sequestered in a room for hours upon hours and sitting in front of a screen that they were supposed to learn from.

This whole idea that closing schools was going to have any impact was just manifestly absurd from very early, and there is just an endless amount of evidence, much of which I observed myself as a parent over time: Kids are going to interact with each other no matter what, and particularly when you think about kids whose parents had to work. What happened with them? Did they stay home alone? Some did, but many of them went to a grandparent’s house, a neighbor looked after them, or they went to a daycare or other situation where they were intermixing with children from a whole variety of nearby neighborhoods and towns. What I show is that this whole hybrid model, where schools were only open two days a week for some kids, or less, with the idea that that was going to mitigate transmission, was nonsensical, and there are tons of data that show this. 

You can look at cellular phone data, and you can see the mobility of American citizens began to increase over time. What we can see is that this completely is in line with what scientists had known for many, many years: People’s ability to comply with unpleasant or difficult directives understandably wanes over time, and there was never any inkling that human beings, by and large, were going to all just imprison themselves and be hermetically sealed. Only the most motivated and financially capable people could and would actually achieve that.

It sounds like you’re saying that we were asking schools to do something that virtually no one else could do.

Even if schools were closed, the point is that children were still mixing with people, and the adults themselves were mixing as well. Lockdowns in a free society do not work over time. There’s some evidence that perhaps they could work if they are absolute and total, where every single thing is closed for a very brief period of time. But the idea that children were locked out of a school building while adults could go to restaurants and bars and casinos and offices and stores — the idea that that logically was going to have any impact — was absurd. Yet it continued for more than a year for many children.

Including yours. At a certain point in summer of 2020, it seemed as if schools might reopen in the fall. And then on July 6, President Trump tweeted, all caps, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL.” As you write, four days later, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out . They had argued “forcefully and unambiguously” for opening schools before this. How much of this disaster was, as you say, Newtonian physics in the political realm? 

The equal and opposite reaction. 

Trump is for it? I’m against it.

It’s quite stark. The example from the American Academy of Pediatrics is quite stunning. The about-face was so obvious that even NPR . But that’s just one example. Throughout the book, I show over and over how people on the left were just reactive against Trump, and even those who wanted to talk about what they thought was wrong often generally didn’t do so. 

I had doctors, many of whom were at prestigious institutions around the country, reaching out to me, talking — always off the record — about how they vehemently disagreed with what was going on in schools: Mask mandates with kids, if the particular schools were open, or quarantines, or barriers on the desks, the six feet of distancing — all of these things that we were told were critical and that there was a consensus, and that this is “what the experts say.”

All these things were a manufactured consensus. This was artificial, and unfortunately, I couldn’t talk about it that much because all of this was off the record. 

Many of these doctors and others, including former CDC officials who would reach out to me, were simply afraid of being cast out amongst their peers. But many of them also were very explicitly told by their administrators, by their bosses at their university hospital or whatever institutions they were with, that they were not allowed to say this. They were not allowed to go against the narrative of the CDC. To me, that’s a far more frightening form of censorship, that the American public was misled in part because there was a false story about a medical consensus. I had access to this information, knowing it was a false narrative, but I was constrained in what I could say. But I will say this: That sort of false narrative continued, not just from doctors who were contacting me and other health experts. 

All we had to do was look at Europe: Tens of millions of children were in school there. But by and large, the media ignored this — not just the media, but our health officials. Or they contrived a variety of reasons that were false about why those kids were in school there.

That actually leads me to my question about journalism: You seem to hold a special disdain for the coverage of the New York Times, which you feel set the tone for fearful, expert-based coverage that largely ignored evidence. What happened, and how did things go wrong so quickly there?

Well, I single out the Times only because they were particularly egregious in their misleading coverage about the pandemic in general and in particular about children in schools. It’s not exclusive, I talk about all sorts of media outlets, but there’s extra focus on the Times because arguably it is the most influential news outlet in the country, certainly amongst the elite decision makers in our culture, whether in politics or other fields. It’s very important for how policy gets made in our country. The framing that The New York Times puts on certain topics is very important. 

If you think about Israel and Palestine, people already have kind of baked-in positions on that largely, so the framing of the Times will probably just anger one group or another, depending on the story. But something like the pandemic, this was new. So people didn’t come at it with a preconceived idea. They came somewhat blank-slate, at least among the broader kind of political left who reads The New York Times. The Times is telling them, “Don’t look over there. Don’t look at what’s happening here,” and if you do look then they give you a about a school in Georgia without providing any context, or a about Israel without providing any context. 

So one of the important things that I hope readers come away with after they finish my book is an understanding about how media can be incredibly misleading without necessarily publishing errors or facts that aren’t true; that you can write something that’s fact checked, and it still can be incredibly misleading by the way the story is framed, by the information that’s left out, by who you choose to interview and quote. All those things are incredibly important regarding how people perceive reality, and you can do all of it without having any errors.

I want to ask about your kids. How are they doing five years later? I guess they’re now in eighth and 10th grade?

That’s right.

How do they see this period of their lives?

They’re like any other teenagers. It’s impossible to have specific correlates for most circumstances, to say, “Pandemic school courses now have led to X in my child.” We, of course, can look at broader data, and rightfully so. There’s a lot of focus on “learning loss” and test scores. And there are a number of studies that clearly show a direct correlation: The less time that kids were in school during the pandemic, the worse their educational outcomes and scores were. We know that it’s directly linked to that. There’s no ambiguity.  

But what I talk about in the book is that there’s so much that happens in life that you can’t quantify. If you just think about what happened to the high school football player who was relying on a scholarship in order to get into college, but the senior year season was terminated. Never happened. What happened to that kid and so many others like him? What happens to the kids who relied on their school theater program or arts programs? 

What happened to the kids who relied on teachers to report abuse at home, because teachers and educators are the No. 1 reporter of child abuse. When schools were closed, those kids had nowhere to go and no one to see what was happening. So a perverse thing happened during the pandemic: Child abuse reports actually went down. But it’s not because there was less abuse. It’s that children lost this important vehicle to actually bring what was happening behind closed doors into the light. Harm is incurred whether there’s a lingering effect or not. 

I’m glad you brought up abuse because that’s one of those things people don’t necessarily see right away.

This was known immediately. In April 2020, they already could see this. The data were already coming in. So to be very clear, health officials knew harm, great harm, was being done to many children, and they continued with the school closures nonetheless. 

A lot of “blue” parents say that COVID radicalized them. And I wonder how you’d describe what it did to you?

I wouldn’t say I’ve been radicalized, but I would say as someone who, generally, for my whole adult life, had positioned myself pretty far on the left, I have always been an independent thinker. I’m not one to go with the crowd. I’ve been independent politically. But observing the way our health authorities behaved in conjunction with legacy media, both of which are predominantly on the political left, and observing the complete disconnect from science, from following evidence, from a clear-eyed, honest view of empirical reality, was incredibly destabilizing. You can never go back from that once you observe that type of behavior. 

These were supposed to be the good guys. I’m not saying this was purposeful, necessarily, or conscious, but people’s hatred for Trump and hatred for Republicans or people on the right so dramatically distorted the lens through which they were seeing the world that they conducted themselves in a fashion that was completely disconnected from reality. One of the great ironies of that era was these lawn signs, “In this house, we believe in science.” These people with the lawn signs generally had absolutely no clue what the science said. They had no clue what they were talking about.

What I’m left with after reading the book is just this kind of sick feeling about what’s going to happen the next time, in the next pandemic. I wonder if you have a sense.

It’s so hard to know. I would just close by saying that I hope my book can do a small part in trying to reveal how the views of society, and in particular, of elite society, spin. My book is essentially one giant case study, composed of a series of case studies, of how health officials and the media operated. And by reading through this narrative of these case studies, you gain a deeper understanding about how things actually work, how individuals and societies make decisions with limited information. Hopefully, people will be armed with that awareness and knowledge. So whatever the next crisis is — it doesn’t need to be a pandemic — you’ll have a more clear-eyed and educated view about what’s actually going on around you. And perhaps that will be able to ultimately change what’s going on around us.

Rachel Hodge worked as a housekeeper at a hospital and was earning an online degree in social work when schools shut their doors due to COVID. Spending hours in front of a laptop with a 5-year-old just didn’t fit into the picture.

But in the fall of 2020, her daughter Vanessa was set to start kindergarten at KIPP Upper Roseville Academy in Newark, New Jersey. With Hodge working and school still remote, Vanessa spent her days with a babysitter, who cared for multiple kids and struggled to manage the technology for virtual learning.

By November, Vanessa was one of 24 kindergartners in Newark’s KIPP charter network listed as missing from remote school.

That’s when KIPP staff created the , a condensed school day that accommodated parents’ upended schedules. The program, which ran weeknights from 5:30 to 8 p.m, remained in place until the end of the school year.

“It was really a sad and scary time,” Hodge said. “But I was like, ‘The kid’s got to learn.’ ”

As Hodge worked on her own assignments from Rutgers University, kindergarten teacher Meredith Eger led Vanessa and classmates in songs and games, and through the reading and math they’d missed since August. 

“It was fun and it was kind of weird,” Vanessa, now 9, recalls. “When class was over, I didn’t have to pack up, because all my stuff was at home.”

The program is a rare example of a school that moved quickly to keep children from missing out on their first year of school — a critical transition period in which they typically start developing academic and social skills. At a time when hundreds of thousands of parents struggled to balance work and Zoom, or held their children out of school until first grade, KIPP’s after-hours program offered families some consistency in the midst of turmoil. 

But nationally, many students who missed out on a normal kindergarten are still feeling the lingering effects of that lost year. released this month documented how the pandemic’s youngest learners experienced significant declines in general knowledge, cognitive development, and language and social skills compared with their peers before COVID. Academically, these students are still performing below pre-pandemic math and reading levels. 

Five years later, Vanessa is one of 11 night-school kindergartners who still attends KIPP Newark schools. She “writes up a storm,” Eger said, and often draws during lunch. Others prefer math. Parents notice their kids sometimes keep to themselves at home — a preference they blame on a shortage of playtime with peers during lockdowns. The educators who ran the program, which served students up to third grade, enjoy a special bond with the kids they nurtured through that trying period, grabbing hugs in the hallway or cafeteria when they can. 

“They were falling drastically behind,” said Rebecca Fletcher, the charter network’s director of school operations. “It was a bright spot in such a dark time.”

‘They weren’t coming to school’

Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University who tracked in kindergarten enrollment during school closures, called KIPP’s night school “a creative way to meet the needs of parents during the crisis and one that wasn’t common in traditional public schools.” Such flexibility may have also kept families from pursuing options, like pods or private schools that were in-person, he said. 

KIPP leaders didn’t compare the performance of the evening kindergartners to students who logged in during the day, making it difficult to measure student outcomes. But the program was born of necessity, Fletcher said: The abbreviated school day was better than no kindergarten at all. 

“They weren’t coming to school,” she said. “It was about meeting families where they were.” 

Parents turned to night kindergarten for a variety of reasons.

Nateesha St. Claire had just had her third child and couldn’t juggle an infant daughter and online school for Omari, her kindergartner.

“At night, there were really no distractions,” she said. The baby was asleep. But it was still a struggle to keep Omari focused on his teacher. If St. Claire didn’t sit close, he’d walk away from the screen. He frequently asked why he couldn’t go to school.

Now in fourth grade, Omari is “thriving” in math, growing in reading and getting help in speech class to pronounce words more clearly, his mother said.

‘A labor of love’ 

One advantage of the evening sessions were smaller classes, which allowed staff to identify students who had learning delays or qualified for special education services. Such needs might have gone undetected in a larger online group, said Kaneshia Clifford, who was principal of the program. 

Two children were on the autism spectrum and others, she said, were nonverbal or “mildly verbal.” She recruited special education teachers to the team who broke lessons down into smaller segments and organized separate Zoom groups for more targeted support. But keeping the kids’ attention while trying to assess their skills proved daunting. Teacher Adrienne Rodriguez Liriano rewarded students who focused on lessons by putting her dog Harlem on her lap in front of the camera. 

“Teachers had to keep a lot of things on their brain,” said Clifford, who had her own kindergartner at home at the time. “They’re looking at screens, asking kids to hold up white boards. They’re trying to monitor engagement in a virtual space, while also collecting data.”

And that was after a full school day of teaching online and sometimes delivering laptops and hotspots to students’ homes. Fletcher described the schedule as “grueling,” but also “a labor of love and devotion.” 

Because of the late hour, some students showed up on Zoom with wet hair and wearing pajamas. Others ate dinner during class. Some nodded off.

Beatriz Warren, who worked during the day as a home health aide in New York City, welcomed the evening option, which allowed her to attend to her son Josiah.

“It’s a mom thing, I guess,” she said. 

Ear infections and surgeries caused Josiah’s learning to be delayed. He received therapy at home before the pandemic, but as kindergarten approached, Warren worried about whether to put him in a general or special education class. Night kindergarten offered a welcome mix of individualized support and as-close-to-normal a classroom experience as possible. 

“He bonded with the kids and the teachers,” she said. And when schools reopened, Warren enrolled him in KIPP Upper Roseville Academy, where Liriano, his teacher, worked — even though it was a half hour away. Liriano now teaches outside of the KIPP network, but still Facetimes with Josiah and his mom.

“He asks about my daughter,” Liriano said. “We became invested in each other’s lives because of the environment we set for them.”

‘He lost a year’

With their children nearing the end of elementary school, parents continue to see the ripple effects of a year without in-person learning. 

Josiah has overcome most learning delays and “does not stop talking,” his mother said. But he often spends time alone rather than playing with friends or toys. And Hodge described Vanessa as a “hermit” who often retreats to her room.

“The kids were so young, they were conditioned to be inside because of COVID,” Hodge said. “I feel like a lot of the kids still are behind socially … because they couldn’t have normal interactions.” 

Aminah Cooley’s grandson Ayden, also part of the evening kindergarten program, didn’t hold a pencil correctly until nearly second grade, she said.

“They were looking at the screen. A lot of times, they weren’t using a pencil,” she said. Now a fourth grader, Ayden loves math and enjoys the popular Dog Man series of graphic novels by Dav Pilkey. But academically, he’s not where he should be.

“He’s behind,” Cooley said. “He lost a year.”

In the fall of 2020, Ayden often missed out on daytime virtual school. His mother was looking for work, internet access was spotty and the “dynamics of the household,” Cooley said, weren’t conducive to keeping a 5-year-old in front of the computer.

Cooley shopped on Facebook Marketplace for a table and chair set so he could do his work and called his house every evening to make sure he logged into class. 

“I knew I had to step in,” she said. “He’s in the fourth grade, and I’m still stepping in.”

When KIPP opened an optional hybrid program in March 2021, Ayden was there.

“He recognized me, and he was like ‘You came to my house!’ ” Fletcher said. “To this day, I’ll see him in the hallway, and he’ll just give me a hug.”

The nation’s second-largest school district now enrolls 408,083 students, according to . In the 2023-24 school year, LAUSD enrolled 419,749 kids; the year before that, 429,349.

“I’m kind of fearing talking about it, because people are just going to go berserk,” said LA Unified Board President Scott Schmerelson of decisions to close schools. 

Schmerelson also insisted he has not given up on finding ways to increase district enrollment with programs that would attract new families to LAUSD schools. 

But, he said, enrollment has fallen so low that many of the district’s schools can’t provide the services students require.

To preserve the quality of instruction, Schmerelson said, some of the district’s 785 public schools may soon need to be combined or closed. 

“We’re just getting worse and worse as far as enrollment goes, and average daily attendance,” said Schmerelson. “Every time a kid comes to school, we’re paid for that day. And when they don’t show up, we’re not paid for that day.”  

LAUSD has been losing students since it peaked in size at 746,831 in 2002. District officials have talked about tackling the enrollment drop for almost as long. Losses accelerated during the pandemic and then slowed, but have since gone up again.  

LAUSD has made a number of efforts to attract new students, mainly based around the idea of offering attractive schooling choices to local families, a district spokesman said. The enrollment declines this year were smaller than expected, according to the spokesman. 

But shrinking schools are bad for students. 

Like many U.S. public school districts, LA Unified is funded on a per-pupil basis. So when the district loses students, it loses income.

Schools with too few students don’t receive the funding to offer extracurricular activities and a variety of enriching classes. They retain fixed staffing and facilities costs, so operations become more expensive on a per-pupil basis, as enrollment shrinks.

Schmerelson, a veteran LAUSD educator and administrator who of the district’s school board last year, believes the district’s enrollment crisis is its most pressing problem and has vowed to tackle the issue in his last term.

He said he expects the board to soon begin discussing the sticky issue of closing or combining under-enrolled schools. Those that become too small, he said, with fewer than 100 students, aren’t viable from a cost or programming standpoint.

In a statement, a Los Angeles Unified spokesman said that there are three schools in the district with fewer than 100 students. The spokesman said the district will not be combining or closing schools this year.

Decisions to close schools are often controversial with the families they serve and the staff they employ. Closing a school is seen as a last resort in many districts, not only because it represents the loss of an asset, but also a loss to the community.   

Enrollment decline is a nationwide problem. School closures in response to such declines have recently prompted pushback in and San Antonio.

In Inglewood, an independent school district in Los Angeles County, plans to close schools have .   

But in Los Angeles, where enrollment has been declining for more than 20 years, many fear closing schools is inevitable.

Conditions such as falling birth rates and rising housing prices have forced LA’s enrollments down for years, and those forces can’t be stopped without seismic changes to economy and demography, said Pedro Noguera, dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education. In addition, independently operated charter schools have enrolled thousands of LA students.  

In other words, get used to it. And it’s not just in LA. Enrollments are falling in districts around the country, thanks to the same forces that are driving down enrollment in LASUD, Noguera said.

“This is the future,” said Noguera. “Declining birth rates, plus families with children who can’t afford to live in the city.”

LAUSD has no choice but to figure out how to consolidate schools, said Noguera. But, if officials are strategic, he said, they should see it “not simply as a loss of a school, but as an opportunity to create schools that are better equipped to serve the community.”

Any changes to schools in LAUSD would be considered by the board with Superintendent Aberto Carvalho, who in the last school year was possible.

Schmerelson said he expects the board will soon discuss combining schools due to falling enrollments, while also working on new solutions to attract new students.   

Former , who consults with districts and labor groups on policy and operations, said the LA Unified’s focus on attendance in the years since the pandemic has been laudable, but now it needs to shift its attention to enrollment.  

Tokofsky said LAUSD needs to be fighting enrollment declines with more aggressive plans to attract families, and maximize resources in shrinking schools.

Decisions to close schools are fraught with hazards, he warned.

“This requires urban planners and big thinkers,” said Tokofsky. “Otherwise, the whole school board will get recalled.”

Carlos Garcia Saldaña drove past block after block of homes, businesses, and churches “wiped off the face of the earth.” The Eaton fire that had consumed large parts of Altadena was still burning in the San Gabriel Mountains. The charter network leader needed to see what remained of his schools.

As Garcia Saldaña approached Odyssey Charter School South, the facade and main entrance appeared intact. But as he looked left and up the hill, he saw a heap of twisted metal and charred rubble where, two days earlier, there had been classrooms, offices, lunch tables, play structures, and an after-school clubhouse. The tree stumps where students used to sit and eat and dream were still smoldering.

“����’s just jarring and heartbreaking,” Garcia Saldaña said.

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Over the past week, wind-whipped wildfires reshaped wide swaths of Los Angeles, and destroying more than 12,000 structures. A dozen or more . The danger is not yet past, with fires only partially contained and high winds forecast through Wednesday.

Hundreds of thousands of students were out of school last week as more than announced temporary closures due to poor air quality, shifting evacuation orders, and the many , , and who had lost their homes.

On Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued suspending many state rules governing schools to make it easier for schools to operate in temporary buildings and for students to enroll across district lines, as well as waiving requirements about instructional days.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, a handful of schools in areas still under evacuation orders, including three that were neighborhood, remained closed early this week. The district announced that students from two ravaged Palisades elementary schools Wednesday from other district buildings on the city’s west side.

Santa Monica-Malibu Unified opened its Santa Monica campuses on Tuesday but kept schools in Malibu closed through Wednesday due to road closures and power and gas outages. Many local families have had to evacuate because of the proximity to the , and the district for affected families. Santa Monica-Malibu Unified also said it was monitoring air quality and that its facilities had air filtration systems in place.

In Pasadena Unified, the Eaton Fire, which started on Jan. 7, badly damaged five of its Altadena campuses, which housed a district middle school (whose student-led ), a defunct elementary school, and three charters, including Odyssey South, known as OCS South. Pasadena Unified said its schools will remain closed through this week but that it will offer self-directed online learning and grab-and-go meal service.

Close-knit community faces widespread losses

Now Garcia Saldaña’s days are consumed with checking on the many families and staff who lost their homes and looking for a space where students could return to school as soon as possible.

Odyssey operates two Altadena charter schools, OCS South and Odyssey Charter, the network’s original school, which sustained minimal damage — some downed trees and smoke residue. The charter network, founded in 1999, now serves a total of 830 students in transitional kindergarten through 8th grade.

OCS South opened its doors in 2018 and relocated to its current location, on the grounds of the former Edison Elementary School, three years ago. Since then, the Odyssey community has set out to make the campus its own — painting murals, planting gardens, and replacing old play structures.

Over the weekend, Garcia Saldaña sent a video message to families describing the damage to buildings at the two campuses. Odyssey Charter will require a major clean-up; the OCS South location was a near-total loss. But Odyssey isn’t about buildings, he said in the video, but about “the community that makes us such a special and unique place that we all love so much.”

Emmanuel Barragan, a father of three OCS South students, echoed that point as he dropped off his daughter and two sons at the Boys & Girls Club of Pasadena on Monday. School leaders know the name of every single child and what they need, he said, noting, “Sometimes, it almost feels like the school is a co-parent.”

Odyssey partnered with the Boys & Girls Club to offer free child care this week. The club also alerted other local schools that its doors would be open this week to any school-age child in need of a safe place to be. The clubhouse was providing all-day programming, including arts and crafts, sports, and educational games, and waiving its drop-in fee.

More than 200 students had arrived by mid-morning on Monday. Garcia Saldaña, better known to students as Dr. Carlos, was at the door to greet Odyssey families. He offered hugs as students made their way inside, and he checked in with caregivers about their housing status.

A survey of Odyssey’s roughly 650 families had yielded more than 300 responses, with 83 student households reporting “full loss of home & belongings.” Others said they didn’t yet know the condition of their home. Four Odyssey employees, including the Odyssey Charter principal, also lost homes in the fire, Garcia Saldaña said.

Altadena native Marcellus Nunley evacuated with his family around 3:45 a.m. on Jan. 8. Within hours, their home was gone. “Everything melted” was how his 5-year-old son, an Odyssey Charter kindergartener, put it. Nunley dropped off his son at the Boys & Girls Club so he could spend the day managing the logistics of a family displaced by fire: calling the mortgage company, reaching out to the county tax assessor, and procuring all of the little life necessities he hadn’t given much thought to until they went up in flames.

The losses are exacerbated by Altadena residents’ love for their neighborhood, with its charming bungalows and craftsman homes, picturesque hiking trails, and beloved local businesses. “Altadena is a diverse community, which is wonderful. ����’s a walking community, it’s a dog walking community, it’s town and country,” Nunley said. “����’s a great melting pot of society.”

Before the Eaton Fire, about 42,000 people resided in Altadena. Many Black families who faced housing discrimination in other Los Angeles neighborhoods in the 1960s. Today, Black residents make up about 18% of the population. Roughly a third of Altadena residents are Hispanic, about 40% are white, and there are many Asian American and biracial families.

The Odyssey student body reflects the community’s racial diversity. ����’s also economically diverse, with about 30% qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, according to Garcia Saldaña.

Caitlin Reilly’s two sons, 10-year-old Townes and 8-year-old Ellar, are students at OCS South. When the Eaton Fire forced another Odyssey family to evacuate early on Jan. 8, they drove to the house Reilly shares with her partner and kids, located in a section of Pasadena outside of an evacuation zone.

For the next four days, the four adults and four children huddled together in the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home. The kids had an epic sleepover, and the parents stared at their devices, searching for the latest news about the fires engulfing Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Odyssey families connected on social media and text chains, offering up what they could and asking for what they needed, Reilly said. They arranged indoor playdates so kids could be together without breathing the smoke-filled air. They replaced baseball bats and gloves for Little League players who had lost theirs to fire, and they organized backpack and supply drives. The school launched a to support recovery efforts.

Fire’s devastation leaves uncertainty about next steps

The evacuated family’s Altadena house is still standing, but their badly damaged neighborhood remained under evacuation orders this week. They secured a temporary rental, but Reilly fears that many local families who lost homes will have a hard time finding a place to stay.

“The fear is that it will be like Katrina,” she said. The 2005 hurricane devastated New Orleans, damaged or destroyed , and . “We’re worried that we’ll lose so many families that are part of the community because there is nowhere to house them.”

That would hit Odyssey hard, given the closeness of its community and the fact that its funding is tied to its enrollment numbers.

“There’s been cheerleading about cleaning up and rebuilding, but as far as logistically what comes next, I don’t think anyone knows yet,” said Reilly, who serves on the Odyssey Charter Schools board.

Mary Scott, whose 10-year-old son, Charlie, attends OCS South, also fears dwindling enrollment at Odyssey. “The reality is, these aren’t all well-off families, and now they have to find a place to rent and rebuild while also having to pay their mortgages,” she said. “I do worry about the families that have to relocate. It would be a tremendous loss.”

Odyssey leadership acknowledges how much remains unknown: when schools will reopen in person, where classes will be held, how many families will stay local and how many will resettle elsewhere, and the extent to which the network will need to rely on remote learning.

Scott, for one, said she’s hoping to avoid remote learning because it was so difficult during COVID school closures when her son was in kindergarten and first grade. But if she had to choose between online schooling and leaving OCS South, she said would likely stay put because “I don’t want to abandon our community.”

Garcia Saldaña said the COVID years taught him a lot about what works for online learning (shorter lessons, movement breaks) and what doesn’t (asking kids to sit still for two to three hours at a time). But he’s mostly focused on finding a temporary physical location so students can return in person as soon as possible.

At the same time, he’s still figuring out the availability of Odyssey’s 115 employees, many of whom remain displaced, and asking teachers to reach out to each of their students.

“����’s about having a familiar voice on the other end of the line saying, ‘What do you need? How is your family?’” he said. “We are all human, first and foremost.”

This was originally published by . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. . 

School districts across Los Angeles County have announced plans to close all or some schools as multiple fires spread across the Los Angeles area.

In total, at least  have announced full or partial closures, according to the L.A. County Office of Education.

Alhambra Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8.

In a , Superintendent Denise Jaramillo said before- and after-school programs and activities are also canceled. 

“We will continue to monitor weather conditions and provide further updates as they become available,” she added, noting the district has not made a decision about Thursday.

Arcadia Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8. 

“All district events and services will also be closed and canceled, including athletics, and after-school program,” the district . 

The district also said it has not made a determination about the rest of the week.

Azusa Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8.

“This closure will allow District staff to thoroughly assess any potential damage to school sites and ensure that schools are safe for students and staff to return,” per a . 

The district said it would keep families updated through email, the website, and social media.

Burbank Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8th.

The  it will not provide child care and that all after-school activities are canceled.

Schools are expected to reopen on Jan. 9.

Duarte Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8.

In a , the district noted that its office and schools lost power on Tuesday.

El Monte City School District

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8. 

Head Start will also be closed. 

The district said  that it expects schools to reopen on Thursday. But a science camp trip for 6th grade students at Cherrylee and Cleminson will be postponed.

Garvey School District

All schools closed Wednesday, January 8.

In a statement on X, State Senator Sasha Renée Pérez announced the closure. The school district was not immediately available for comment.

Glendale Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8.

“This decision was made to prioritize the safety of our students, employees, and families, as wind and fires have significantly impacted the accessibility of roadways and the air quality in our area,” the district .

The district said it would make a determination Wednesday afternoon about whether schools will remain closed Thursday.

La Cañada Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8. 

In a , the district said it anticipates reopening on Thursday, Jan. 9.

Las Virgenes Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8. 

In a statement posted to the district’s Facebook page, Superintendent Dan Stepenosky said that Southern California Edison had turned off the power at a number of schools. The district hopes to reopen Thursday, he said.

Los Angeles Unified

Los Angeles Unified School District announced a growing list of school closures for Wednesday, Jan. 8.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho described a challenging day ahead for the district at an 8 a.m. press conference Wednesday. He said a number of schools are closed down, and further decisions for school closures for tomorrow will be made by 4 p.m.

For schools that are open today, he said the district will be flexible with its attendance policies.

“We know today is not going to be a perfect day,” he said. “We will utilize grace and discretion.”

All athletic activities, games, and practices are cancelled for Wednesday.

The following schools are closed:

• Kenter Canyon Charter Elementary
• Canyon Charter Elementary School
• Marquez Charter Elementary School
• Palisades Charter Elementary School 
• Paul Revere Charter Middle School
• Topanga Elementary Charter School
• The Zoo Magnet at North Hollywood High School will not have classes at the Los Angeles Zoo. Students and staff will report to the North Hollywood High School main campus.

In addition, more schools in the central and eastern part of the district (north of Manchester Boulevard/Firestone Boulevard, East of 10th Avenue, West of Interstate 710, and South of Highway 134) will be closed due to hazardous air quality conditions.

LAUSD officials said Wednesday morning that they would release a full list shortly.

Students will have online learning resources made available through the district’s .

, an independent school located on district property, but the campus is currently not in session. On Wednesday morning, Carvalho said the high school had “significant damage” from the fire. 

LAUSD “will also work with the appropriate agencies to secure funding relief for Palisades Charter High School, Palisades Charter Elementary School, and any school impacted by the extreme weather,” the district said in a statement late Tuesday night.

Monrovia Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8.

In a , Superintendent Paula Hart Rodas said the rest of the week is up in the air.

“Our district teams will be on-site tomorrow to assess any damages caused by the wind and ensure the safety and security of all school facilities,” she said. “We will provide an update on our school schedule for Thursday, Jan. 9, once the assessment is complete.”

Mountain View School District

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8. 

“This decision was made to prioritize the safety of our school communities as this wind storm event has significantly impacted the accessibility of roadways, causing potential hazards as our families and staff make their way to and from school,” wrote Superintendent Raymond A. Andry in . 

District staff will assess campuses Wednesday and provide an update on whether schools will reopen.

Pasadena Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8.

Meals: Grab & Go meals will be available for pick-up at 10 a.m. and noon at: 

• Madison Elementary (515 E Ashtabula St.)
• McKinley School (325 S Oak Knoll Ave.)
• Willard Elementary (301 Madre St.)

, Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco said the district would make an announcement Wednesday about whether schools will reopen Thursday.

Rosemead School District

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8. 

The district  and cited the high winds. The district will assess any damage to campuses Wednesday and plans to reopen schools Thursday, Jan. 9.

San Gabriel Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8. 

The school district cited the ongoing fires and “associated safety concerns” as the reason for the closures. The closure affects both students and employees. 

San Marino Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8. 

The power went out at all four of the San Gabriel Valley district’s schools and there was widespread debris, Superintendent Linda de la Torre . 

“This decision was not made lightly,” de la Torre wrote. “After consulting with the fire and police chiefs, neighboring superintendents, as well as with our Board President, we believe this is the safest course of action for our students, staff, and families given the ongoing hazardous conditions.” 

The district plans to reopen schools Thursday, Jan. 9.

Santa Monica-Malibu Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8.

Santa Monica-Malibu USD  that all schools will be closed on Wednesday and staff would work from home. 

“Essential emergency staff and maintenance and operations staff should report for duty and check in with their supervisors,” the district statement said.

South Pasadena Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8. 

Superintendent Geoff Yantz  that the decision to close schools was made in consultation with the South Pasadena Police and Fire Departments and the school board president. 

“SPUSD schools and many areas within South Pasadena do not have power due to the ongoing wind storms and fire activity,” Yantz wrote. 

The district plans to reopen schools on Thursday, Jan. 9.

Temple City Unified

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8.

The district cited power outages, downed trees and damage to several campuses in .

The district plans to assess damages before determining whether to open schools Thursday, Jan. 9. A previously planned “student free day” on January 29 will now be a regular school day.

Valle Lindo

All schools closed Wednesday, Jan. 8. 

Superintendent Paula Hart Rodas  that the decision to close was made to “prioritize the safety of our students, staff, and community members.” 

District staff will assess campuses Wednesday and then provide an update on Thursday’s school schedule.

Caltech

Caltech announced that its campus in Pasadena will be closed for “all nonessential operations” on Wednesday. For more information, visit .

More fire coverage

For the most up-to-date information about the fire, you can check:

Palisades Fire

Eaton Fire

Hurst Fire

This was originally published on .

As enrollments drop, city after city is facing pressure to close half-empty schools. Fewer kids means fewer dollars. Consolidating two schools saves money because it means paying for one less principal, librarian, nurse, phys ed teacher, counselor, reading coach, clerk, custodian … you get the idea. Low-enrollment schools end up on the chopping block because they’re the ones that typically cost more per pupil.

But there is another way to cut costs without closing underenrolled schools.

First, it’s worth noting that small schools needn’t cost more per pupil. Our school include examples of small schools all across the country that operate on per-pupil costs comparable to those of their larger peers — some even delivering solid student outcomes.

But here’s the catch: These financially viable small schools are staffed very differently than larger schools.

There’s a 55-student school near Yosemite that spends about $13,000 a student — well under the California state average. How do they make it work? One teacher teaches grades 2, 3 and 4. There’s no designated nurse, counselor or PE teacher, and rather than traditional athletics, students learn to ski and hike.

A quick glance at the many different financially viable small schools across different states reveals that staff often wear multiple hats. The principal is also the Spanish teacher, or the counselor also teaches math.

Also common are multi-level classrooms. When my kids attended a small rural high school, physics was combined with Advanced Placement physics, which meant my 10th and 12th graders were in the same class, but with different homework.

Sometimes schools give kids electives via online options, send them to other schools for sports or forgo some of these services altogether. Some have no subs (merging classes in the case of an absence). Sometimes the schools partner with a community group or lean on parents to help in the library or to coach sports.

Done well, smallness can be an asset, even with the more limited services and staff. Whereas a counselor might be critical in a larger school to ensure that a student has someone to talk to, with fewer students in a small school, relationships come easier. Teachers may have more bandwidth to assist a struggling student.

What isn’t financially viable? A school with the full complement of typical school staff but fewer kids. These aren’t purposely designed small schools; rather, they’re underenrolled large schools (sometimes called ). The Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, has a slew of tiny schools spending over $30,000 per pupil. Such schools vary in performance, but all sustain their higher per-pupil price tag by drawing down funds meant for students in the rest of the district. In the end, no one wins.

With so much aversion from parents to closing schools (witness, for example, , Chicago, San Francisco, , Pittsburgh or Denver), we might expect more districts to adopt these nontraditional staffing models as a way to save costs and keep families happy.

In some cities, it’s the that are offering just that: smaller, nontraditional programs that make it work without extra subsidies.

Some will argue that nontraditional schools (including charters) won’t work for every student. Districts must take all comers, including English learners, families needing extra supports, those wanting a full athletics program, specialty autism services and so on. That said, the idea here is that larger districts needn’t offer those services in every school, provided they’re available elsewhere in the district.

But it’s these larger districts that are the most wedded to the uniform staffing structure. ����’s so deeply embedded in job titles and union rules, as well as program specifications and more.

Tolerating small, nontraditional schools would mean letting go of some of that rigidity and accepting the idea that schools can be successful without all those fixed inputs. And it might mean reducing some staff who believe their roles are protected when enshrined in a staffing formula. On the flip side, if the school in question has higher outcomes, and the choice is to close it or redesign its staffing structure to transform it into a more intentionally small school, parents and students may accept that trade if it means preserving the school community.

It would also mean changing budgeting practices so that what gets allocated is a fair share of the dollars per pupil — in contrast with allocations based on standardized staffing prescriptions.

The last decade saw a big push for inputs-based models, including “every school needs a counselor” or “every school needs a nurse.” As enrollments continue to fall, these inflexible one-size-fits-all allocations stand in the way of keeping small schools open.

None of this is to say that every school should remain open. Many will inevitably close. But for some of those that deliver solid outcomes for their students, perhaps now is the right time to rethink the typical schooling model. 

The state school board on Wednesday approved another round of school closures in West Virginia after county superintendents repeated a similar problem: student enrollment is rapidly declining and causing financial distress.

Seven schools throughout Clay, Preston, Wetzel and Wood County will close in the next few years. Impacted students will be moved into already-existing schools.

“Most towns die after a closure of a high school,” said Charles Goff, mayor of the town of Hundred in Wetzel County. He spoke to board members in Charleston ahead of the vote. “[Towns] lose incorporated status, lose elected officials in town, and it leads to fire departments closing and town charters being revoked. That includes losing EMS. We are an hour away from the hospital, and fire and EMS are crucial in our community.”

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There has been a wave of proposed school closures this year as counties are faced with budget holes spurred by student population loss. West Virginia’s overall population is declining. Roughy 4,000 students left public schools this year; some of those students left to attend private and charter schools or to be homeschooled.

Under the current school funding formula, counties receive state funding based on the number of students.

Fifty-three schools have closed in the previous five years, and counties this year have proposed or been approved to close 25 schools. In November, the state school board as the district has lost thousands of students over the last few years.

“����’s a difficult time and the problems that … counties are facing are financial and it’s bringing us to this day,” said Debra Sullivan, a state school board member. “We need to focus on strengthening our public school system.”

More than 10,000 students statewide opted this year to use , the state’s broad education savings account program that gives roughly $4,400 per student in taxpayer money to families to use for private school, homeschooling and more.

Wood County has more than 300 students using the Hope Scholarship this year, which meant the district didn’t get $1 million in state funding because those children were no longer counted in the enrollment-based formula. In Clay County, dozens of students are using the scholarship, equating to $157,000 in state funding no longer available to the county.

Several members of the West Virginia Board of Education have called the GOP-heavy Legislature . Governor-elect Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, said he in the state, where the vast majority of students in the poor state attend public schools.

“The state needs to revise the funding formula for these schools. It hasn’t been done for years and years,” said state school board Vice President Victor Gabriel. “We just don’t have the people and money, and it’s getting worse. Every time we lose students we lose dollars.”

Counties are required to keep balanced budgets.

“We’re a poor county, so we have to live within the state aid formula. We reduced our personnel by about 10% last year, 26 [people]. That includes positions that were paid for by COVID dollars,” Clay County Superintendent Philip Dobbins told board members.

The board voted to close Clay County Middle School, the county’s only middle school, due to declining student population and the age of the building. Sixth grade students will attend the elementary schools; seventh and eighth grade students will attend Clay High School. It will take effect at the end of the 2026-27 school year.

The county has less than 8,000 people, down from 10,000 a few years ago, and there has been a 31% decline in students since 2016. More

“That’s several million dollars we’re down. That’s significant,” Dobbins said.

Superintendents say school closures necessary for finances

Like Dobbins, superintendents from Preston, Wetzel and Wood said funding woes were the driving reason for the closures. Some of the schools that will close need millions of dollars in repairs that don’t make sense for older buildings.

Wetzel County Superintendent Cassie Porter said the closures of Hundred High School and Paden City High School were necessary as the county’s population continued to decline. The district has lost 800 students.

She said her district couldn’t offer the rigorous courses needed at all the high schools in its current situation.

“Our test scores rank very, very low. We need to pull our resources together, in our opinion,” Porter said.

Several parents, students and community members attended the meeting to voice opposition to the closures.

Austin Hayes, a freshman at Hundred High School, said his small school had offered him a chance to participate in many different learning activities. He asked the board to reconsider closing his school.

“Just this year, I was part of the culineering team that got first in the state. In a larger school, these opportunities would be much harder to come by with more students vying for limited spots,” he said. “At Hundred, every student gets a chance to shine.

The board voted to consolidate Hundred High School into Valley High School. Paden City High School, which already faced a possible temporary closure , will be consolidated into Magnolia High School.

In Preston County, schools Superintendent Brad Martin said Fellowsville Elementary School in Tunnelton has seen a 50.8% decrease in student enrollment over the last 10 years. There are 59 students enrolled in the school this year. The school needs $2 million dollars in repairs; Martin said that closing it would save around $684,000.

County-wide enrollment is down with a decline in local coal mining jobs, Martin said, spurring a drop in state funding for schools. County residents opted not to approve two different excess levies that could have provided extra money.

“Based on this year, the district will be required to eliminate 12 professional positions and 16 service positions. We made substantial cuts in positions last year,” Martin said.

Fellowsville will be consolidated into South Preston School at the end of this school year.

The board also approved consolidating Rowlesburg School, an elementary school also in Preston County, into Aurora School at the end of this school year due to a drop in students and the price tag of building maintenance.

Fairplains Elementary School in Wood County will be closed and merged into Martin Elementary School at the end of the 2024-2025 school year.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

Even as student enrollment declines drive staggering nationally, one group of students in particular — children from immigrant households — have been blamed for straining education budgets. 

Politically aligned media sources are laying the groundwork for President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans. The Fox News station in El Paso, Texas, for example, ran a story this week stating that America’s public schools have endured a massive financial hit and removing these students would be an “attempt to alleviate the problem.” Its only source: an interview a right-wing pundit from the Leadership Institute gave to the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.

With the estimated to the U.S. since 2022, according to an October Reuters report, some districts have described budget constraints and challenges in accommodating language barriers and unmet educational needs. 

Trump and his allies, who plan to use the military to carry out massive deportations at the onset of his second term, have made clear their intention to:

• to citizenship for anyone born in the U.S.
  
• case affirming undocumented children’s right to a free public education. 
  
• to carry out raids in classrooms. 

U.S.-born children could become targets, too.

In , Trump floated the possibility of removing immigrants’ American-born relatives during deportations because he doesn’t “want to be breaking up families.” 

“The only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” said Trump, who was widely at the southern border during his first term. 

On the ground: In an in-depth investigation this year, my colleague Jo Napolitano exposed how hundreds of schools across the country illegally denied entry to older immigrant students, expressing “​pervasive hostility and suspicion” toward these new arrivals. In an update this week, Jo explores how the Oakland, California, school district works to welcome — rather than reject — its newcomers.

Click here to read Jo’s latest story.

In the news

As schools nationwide deploy surveillance tools to monitor students online, the youth mental health crisis is being met with late-night home visits from the police and hospitalizations. |

• “The majority of cases that I saw were serious or concerning enough to merit hospitalization, and that in the majority of cases the parents were not aware of the child’s suicidality,” said Dr. Leticia Ryan, the director of pediatric emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

‘Child executions’: Police say the man who carried out a religiously motivated shooting last week at a Christian elementary school that left two kindergarteners wounded wrote that he was acting in response to “America’s involvements in genocide and oppression of Palestinians.” |

In a new lawsuit against tech company Character.ai, parents accuse its AI chatbot of encouraging their children to commit self harm and murder. |

����’s a bird … it’s a plane … it’s a drone spewing pepper spray. Aerial support could soon hover over Texas schools under a bill that seeks to increase state spending on campus security from $10 to $100 per student. |

Andrew Ferguson, tapped by Trump to chair the Federal Trade Commission, promised in a memo to the incoming administration to “hold big tech accountable,” “protect freedom of speech and fight wokeness” and “the trans agenda.” |

• Advocates with the nonprofit Fight for the Future said Ferguson’s statements bolster LGBTQ+ advocates’ opposition to the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, legislation designed to prevent childrens’ access to social media content deemed harmful. The bill was revived for the umpteenth time in Congress this week. |
  
• “It is unbelievably insulting that after years of this conversation about KOSA, young queer and trans people are still being gaslit about the harms that this legislation poses to their online communities,” Fight for the Future campaigner Sarah Phillips wrote.  |

More from the FTC: The commission has reached a settlement with school “weapons detection” company Evolv Technology after accusing the maker of AI-powered security screens of misstating its ability to identify threats and keep kids safe. | The 74

A 12-year-old girl was handcuffed for three hours inside her New York City elementary school after law enforcement officials said she hit a school safety officer during a fight with a classmate. |

A 33-year-old Connecticut school resource officer died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound hours after he was arrested and accused of luring a child online. |

• Related: New Justice Department guidance urges police departments to train campus cops on keeping appropriate boundaries with kids following an investigation into predatory officers who use their positions to groom students. |

The socioeconomics of cybercrime: Children from affluent households “are at greater risk of being targeted and compromised by cybercriminals,” according to new Javelin research, because they have greater access to social media and credit cards linked to digital accounts. Yet, “society’s most vulnerable children, those in foster care, are ideal candidates for exploitation by cybercriminals.” |

ICYMI @The74

• ‘There are risks both ways’: Supreme Court Weighs Medical Care for Trans Youth

• ‘How Far Will RFK Go?’ 2 Experts Talk Kennedy’s Potential Impact on Child Health

• Child Hunger Rose 6% in Kansas, and it Isn’t Clear What State Lawmakers Will Do

Emotional support

Introducing Sagan, the newest addition to 74 editor Andrew Brownstein’s crew. 

Everybody say, ‘Hi, Sagan.” 

Rumor has it the 3-year-old pup — named after the astronomer, duh — is a real pro at fetching the frisbee.

But it’s not just Chicago. Over the last decade, districts have closed fewer and fewer schools. As of 2021-22, the most recent year for which national is available, districts closed 666 schools — the lowest number in more than 20 years. (Charter school closures are also at historically low levels.)

In many cases, closing neighborhood schools is disruptive for students and communities, and deciding which to shutter tears neighborhoods apart. So the decline in shutdowns might seem like a positive trend. If school closures are bad for students, it’s a good thing that fewer kids are displaced, right?

Not necessarily. For one thing, districts may have simply delayed the inevitable, because student headcounts have been falling. Public school enrollments fell by 1.2 million children in the wake of the pandemic, and thousands of schools nationwide suffered declines of 20% or more.

Worse, the most recent suggest enrollments will fall another 5% by 2031 — and those don’t take into account any reductions in immigration during the next Trump administration.

Too many district leaders closed their eyes to financial reality and hoped for population trends to suddenly reverse. But there are signs they may be starting to grapple with the harsh budget truth. Denver tried to close schools two years ago and backed down, but is trying again this year. ; ; ; ; , Texas; and , Georgia, are all in the midst of painful deliberations about school closures. The district outside San Jose, California, is considering closing or consolidating nearly half of its schools.

It is precisely because school closure decisions are disruptive that districts should have acted when times were good. Making these decisions under real financial duress constrains their choices and potentially exacerbates the negative effects. For example, Philadelphia overwhelmed its school system when it was forced into a massive wave of closures a decade ago, ultimately shuttering 10% of its schools over two years. , for both the displaced students and their new peers, as the number of students affected grew.

But the of school closures largely depend on what happens to the affected students. And as EdNavigator’s Tim Daly wrote last year, there are no-cost ways for districts to mitigate the downsides. For example, they could ensure that any displaced student has access to a school that is better than the shuttered one —not just the closest. Money can also help, in the form of counselors and other types of navigators who can help kids with the transition.

Of course, selecting which schools to close is no easy task. When I looked at this question recently for a large urban district in the South, I found there was a Venn diagram that found quite a bit of overlap among schools that were small and expensive, that were losing students, and that were getting poor academic results.

Consider the table below, with three real but anonymized schools. The school I call Washington could be a likely candidate for closure. It is serving 40% fewer students than it did pre-pandemic, which has driven its per-pupil cost far above the district average of about $14,000. The state has also given it a “D” rating for academic performance.

But the district wouldn’t want to blindly follow the enrollment and cost trends, or else it might close a school like Adams, which sports an “A” rating from the state. On the other end, the Jefferson school is comparatively cheap to operate, and its student enrollment has held up comparatively well, but those kids are getting only middling results. By closing high-cost, low-performing schools like Washington, this district would have more money to invest in schools like Jefferson, to help them raise their students’ performance.

Outsiders like me have access only to academic and financial factors like these, but districts would also need to factor in geographic and demographic issues to see which communities would be affected, whether there are any potential growth patterns in housing that could improve population trends, and whether the district has other viable uses for the buildings themselves.

A district might also decide on a course of action other than closure or consolidation, but that would require the shrinking schools to operate differently. Could they restructure their compensation packages to invest in fewer, higher-paid employees, like a school in New York City that pays its teachers $140,000 a year? Could they adopt team-based staffing models that break apart the traditional one-classroom, one-teacher approach?

Or, rather than engaging in a centralized decision-making process, district leaders could learn from the school choice world and let families vote with their feet. For example, recent research on found that a combination of improving options for families and closing the lowest-performing schools had large benefits for students. And, when the Reason Foundation looked recently at inter-district transfer programs in three states, it found that families to the highest-rated schools and away from the lowest-rated ones. Similarly, of Los Angeles’ “Zones of Choice” program found that it boosted student achievement and raised college enrollment rates by 5%. Districts could lean into those findings and help families make informed choices about the best options available to them.

But regardless of what approach they take, district leaders need to start with honest projections of enrollment trends in their community, followed by a plan for how to handle them. Students will be better off if district leaders look for proactive solutions sooner rather than later.

Financial dysfunction is plaguing many city school districts.

is the most concerning. The district’s current $300 million budget gap is set to triple next year, which isn’t surprising since enrollment dropped 10% over six years as the district added staff. Now, it won’t close schools, won’t reduce the workforce and is being told by the mayor to give in to union demands for big raises. How would the math work? The mayor wants the district to take out a short-term, high-interest loan. Oh, and the city and district still need to work out how to .

is a close second. Two years ago, leaders agreed to a costly labor agreement that they admitted would require major cuts. But then they didn’t make those cuts. Instead, leaders exhausted all reserves and are borrowing money they’ll have to pay back by 2026. What’s the plan for the $100 million budget deficit? None yet. 

Why are financial crises suddenly common among large urban districts? Federal relief funds are part of the issue. Despite warnings that the money was temporary, many city districts used those one-time funds for salary raises and new staff hires.  

Some never had a plan for what would happen next. For example, when the federal relief funds ended, leaders in seemed surprised by a glaring $143 million hole in their budget forecast.

Of course, it’s never easy to cut labor. But avoidance makes it worse over time. In a recent hostage-like negotiation, the superintendent demanded $10 million from the city within 24 hours or the district would start issuing pink slips.

Falling birth rates are another factor. Over the long term, fewer kids means fewer dollars and a need for fewer schools. Closing schools is tough work, and many city districts especially aren’t up for it. In , schools are down to capacity. After pressing pause on its school closures, now has until Dec. 15 to come up with an alternative or face a potential .

Sometimes it’s basic financial mismanagement. For months, , inadvertently overpaid its staff, which, not surprisingly, has created a drain on the budget.

got behind on filing its financial reports and ended up with a state-imposed “corrective action plan” that involved repayment of $43 million. After the state imposed an external financial audit, the district has since .

In , where Las Vegas is located, “miscalculations” keep shifting the budget gap by tens of millions. And because New Orleans dragged its feet on surfacing a $20 million miscalculation of local tax revenue, each of its schools must cut some six or more staff midyear.

In St. Louis, the issue appears to be an unwarranted spending spree by a newly hired — and now fired — superintendent.

All these financial messes are leaving kids in the lurch. The dysfunction destabilizes the district, often leaving little time to make consequential decisions like staffing cuts or school closures. Employees are demoralized. Trust in the system erodes. Families with means pursue other options. Most of all, the financial upheaval takes all eyes off the district’s primary responsibility: student learning.

What is it about city school systems that predisposes them to such financial dysfunction? One obvious factor is that leaders are underprepared to manage complex financial operations that can involve upward of a billion dollars — or more — in public funds. Coming off a that outpaced inflation, few of today’s leaders have any experience with making hard budget tradeoffs. As forecasts change, leaders ignore the signs, stall or, in the case of , pass off major budget-cutting to a task force of 40 volunteers.  

Another reality is the intense, unbalanced political dynamics common in today’s urban centers. Powerful labor groups make unaffordable demands. Vocal parents resist program reductions or school closures. Some elected board members reverse planned cuts, imagining they’re defending constituents from the heartless bean counters in the district’s finance office. The good finance leaders flee the turmoil. Eventually, the district runs out of beans.

Strong district leadership should be an antidote. Leaders need to be , sharing options and explaining financial tradeoffs. They need to make hard choices, laser-focused on what’s best for students. They need to safeguard their schools’ financial integrity, ensuring that today’s decisions don’t erode the education of tomorrow’s students.

Missing in action are states. Typically, legislatures throw up their hands and bemoan local control. Many are wary of state takeover policies in part because of their of impacts on students.

But there are . Requiring multi-year budget forecasts and minimum levels of fiscal reserves are a start. States can then adopt policies that get triggered when districts overspend and deplete those reserves, each with the goal of helping the district get back on track. With some 80% to 90% of expenses going to personnel, states could mandate that labor contracts be reopened for renegotiation. They could appoint a financial auditor to communicate honestly about district finances. Also triggered could be a requirement that the board and leaders undergo finance training and hold more frequent meetings until budget gaps are addressed.

Standing by while finances erode further in these urban districts is unfair to the many students who depend on their leaders to manage the billions being deployed for their education. Continuing to look the other way will make things worse. City kids need the adults to figure this out.

The conventional wisdom is that shuttering aging buildings with few students makes economic sense. But the economics of school closures have been thorny in Chicago, where officials closed 50 of the city’s 684 district schools in 2013. Eleven years later, savings have been less than expected, while the closings have proven disruptive to students and communities. They also carry economic consequences for the city and remain politically radioactive: The school board recently approved a until 2027. 

The Chicago experience is a cautionary tale for today’s policymakers contemplating school shutdowns.

When the 50 schools were shuttered, primarily in low-income communities serving students of color, city officials estimated the district would save $1 billion over 10 years: $560 million on building repairs and $43 million a year in salaries for principals and support staff.

But following accusations by parents, activists and local elected officials opposing the closings that the numbers were inflated, the district its savings estimates downward by 20%, to $438 million. Also that year, WBEZ, the Chicago National Public Radio affiliate, that the district was not accounting for $329 million it borrowed to prepare the schools that were to enroll the displaced students. That borrowing cost $25 million annually, starting in 2015 and continuing until 2045, for a total of $750 million.

Then, a 2023 by the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ found that the labor savings for employing fewer principals, assistant principals and school clerks amounted to about $25 million a year, $18 million less annually than projected. 

Beyond the shrinking cost savings, there’s evidence that the closures contributed to the decline of the low-income Black neighborhoods where the schools were located. The Sun-Times and WBEZ analysis looked at census data and found that Black neighborhoods that experienced a permanent school closure in 2013 subsequently lost population at three times the rate of other Chicago Black neighborhoods. Census tracts with a majority Black population that included closed schools lost 9.2% of their residents between 2013 and 2018, the news organizations found, compared with 3.2% in Black census tracts with schools that did not close.

Those statistics don’t prove that the school shutdowns accelerated declines in neighborhoods that were already depopulating. And charter schools in those communities may have encouraged some Black families to stay put, slowing the decline. But having a school near home is a draw for families, especially those with elementary school students. And in a struggling neighborhood, the closing of a school can be the last straw for families who are considering moving away. Notably, 49 of the 50 closed schools were elementary schools. 

Shuttering the schools didn’t improve academic outcomes for their students. A 2018 from the UChicago Consortium on School Research found that students from closed schools were absent and suspended at the same rates as peers in their new schools. But they had lower math scores for at least four years after transferring. And the Sun-Times and WBEZ analysis showed that they graduated from high school at slightly lower rates than students in schools with similar demographics that didn’t close. A 2023 of school closings in the San Antonio Independent School District yielded similar results: Attendance, grades and state test scores didn’t improve after students transferred to their new schools.

Nor did then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and district officials renovate and reopen the closed schools as other community assets, as they pledged to do by the end of 2014. A large-scale sale fell through, as did an effort to have local aldermen manage sales. As of May 2023, of the closed school buildings had been successfully reopened for other purposes. Many of the others have become graffiti-covered eyesores. 

By contrast, Kansas City Public Schools developed a community-focused approach to the 30 school buildings it closed in 2011. The district hired an urban planner with experience in community development, who held public meetings and tours before putting each building on the market. Each time a serious offer was made, more meetings were held. The district has sold 22 buildings, has one under contract, demolished five and is holding three for future use. 

School districts can’t ignore the inefficiencies of underenrolled schools, especially when they are faltering academically. But the aftermath of Chicago’s school closings a decade ago points to the importance of a clear-eyed approach that prioritizes public transparency and takes into account the financial, academic and community consequences of closings. It suggests the need to balance cost savings with preserving the vitality of neighborhoods and the need for resources to support struggling students wherever they attend school.