Caldwell Parish, in rural Louisiana, and Capitol Hill, a gentrified neighborhood in the District of Columbia, each recently considered merging nearby elementary schools to balance enrollment, better distribute resources, create a broader socioeconomic and racial demographic mix, and improve academic performance.
The strategy was successfully implemented in Caldwell Parish, whereas D.C. officials hit the pause button on further consideration until at least 2027.
What exactly is this strategy? What are its benefits and drawbacks? Education Week spoke extensively to experts on school integration and rezoning to tackle those and other common questions about merged schools.
What are merged schools?
Merged schools—sometimes called “paired,” “center,” or “cluster” schools—are created by combining the student populations of two or more neighboring schools and splitting them into separate campuses, typically by grade band.
This might look like taking two geographically close K-5 elementary schools—one serving mostly students in poverty and the other serving mostly affluent students—and combining their boundaries to create more socioeconomically heterogenous K-2 and grades 3-5 schools.
The same group of children starts at one campus for early-elementary school and then heads to the other for upper elementary. The campuses may or may not share a principal.
The strategy is a twist on traditional boundary redrawing used to relieve overcrowding, achieve a broader socioeconomic or racial mix, or both.
Importantly, the approach isn’t always about integration. School mergers of this kind have also been used to make better use of resources and try to improve academic performance.
The practice was common during the desegregation era following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision but faded in subsequent decades.
Recently, though, the idea seems to be seeing a resurgence. Since 2017, schools in Chicago; Charlotte, N.C.; Richmond, Va.; Sausalito, Calif.; and D.C. have merged schools or considered doing so. The strategy was successfully implemented in some places—including Charlotte—but ran aground in others, including Richmond.
What kinds of schools are most likely to merge?
Merged schools tend to be elementary schools that share a feeder pattern, in part because they are typically smaller and more likely to mirror segregated housing patterns.
They are more common in rural areas—where an entire district may combine schools, as in Caldwell Parish—and in urban areas, where uneven gentrification may create starkly different demographics at neighboring schools, as in Washington.
How can merged schools help achieve greater school integration?
The strategy has untapped potential, according to a March report by researchers at Northeastern University.
They examined how the approach might play out in the 200 school districts with the most elementary students enrolled in neighborhood-assigned schools (i.e., not magnets or charters).
If those districts set up merged schools, racial segregation would decrease by a median of 20%, and by as much as 60% in some districts, the report concluded. Meanwhile, commute times would increase by about 3.7 minutes in driving time, each way, on average.
“Across many districts, school mergers can serve as an effective school integration strategy without imposing large driving time increases for families,” according to the report.
Why might merged schools be a better way to integrate than a more traditional approach to redrawing a boundary?
Back in the 1960s and 70s, students of color were typically the ones commuting away from their neighborhoods to achieve diversity.
Merged schools distribute the transportation burden across communities. What’s more, although boundary shifts can disrupt peer groups, students at merged schools stay with their cohort.
Mergers also offer something other rezoning attempts may not, said Nabeel Gillani, an assistant professor of design and data analysis at Northeastern University and an author of the report on the potential impact of school mergers.
Instead of feeling like something is “being taken away,” communities can adopt a mindset of “we’re getting to build something new together,” Gillani said.
What are the obstacles to creating merged schools?
Community pushback is a consistent obstacle to any rezoning effort. With pairings, in particular, families and staff at both schools may feel a loss, despite district leaders’ best efforts.
A neighborhood’s identity is often deeply tied to its school, Gillani said. Mergers represent “two identities, two cultures coming together,” he explained.
Transportation is another logistical hurdle, especially for families with children in different grade bands. A parent might have to drop off a kindergartner at one campus and a 3rd grader at another.
What are the benefits of merged schools for teaching and learning?
Experts say this strategy offers unique advantages for instruction and school culture that simple boundary shifts do not.
When there are more teachers working at the same grade level, collaboration improves, and veteran teachers can more easily mentor newcomers.
Before Caldwell Parish merged its schools, teachers were lucky if they had at least one other colleague at their grade level.
Now, a novice teacher can “actually go across the hall and see a strategy in place,” said Maria Guerrero, the district’s literacy specialist.
Specialists, including instructional coaches and special education staff, can also focus more deeply on a narrower set of grade levels.
Class sizes may be smaller. And schools can more easily separate students who don’t get along, behaviorally or socially.
Merged schools can also foster stronger age-specific cultures—tailoring extracurriculars and social-emotional programming to narrower age bands (such as 5- to 7-year-olds versus 5- to 11-year-olds).
What are the downsides of merged schools for teaching and learning?
Merged schools serve fewer grades, so it can make it harder to accelerate a child’s learning by placing them in a class with older students.
Transitions between campuses can also be challenging—especially for students with learning and thinking differences, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder.
That was a concern in Caldwell Parish.
Katie Foy, whose son is on the autism spectrum, said she felt like “the rug was pulled out from under us” when the district announced the changes.
Though special education director Rebekah Meredith and her team worked hard to smooth the transition, Foy still believes the traditional model was a better fit for her son.
Next year, her son will be at the district’s 4-5 grade school. “I don’t know how his education is going to look in 4th grade, because he’s not on a 4th grade level,” Foy said.
What are the outcomes for merged schools?
That’s an understudied question, experts say.
“It’s a ripe area for more research. I don’t think that people have really looked systemically at this,” said Halley Potter, the director of P-12 policy at the Century Foundation. “Every community seems to just sort of stumble upon it like, ‘Oh, here’s this idea that, like, we thought of, that no one else has thought of, let’s go ahead and try it.’”
Still, there are promising signs.
At Billingsville-Cotswold, a merged elementary school in Charlotte, N.C., students from all racial and income groups have met or exceeded their growth targets every year for the past seven years, according to the school’s principal, Alicia Hash.
Caldwell Parish experienced an initial “implementation dip,” particularly at its grades 2-3 school, McCann said. However, the district made strong academic gains across the board in the second year of the model. Caldwell became Louisiana’s most improved district in progressing students at all grade levels and subjects to “mastery” level on the state assessment.
McCann credits the progress to increased teacher collaboration and the ability of coaches and special education teachers to focus more tightly on grade-level content.
Meanwhile, educators at Caldwell Parish Junior High, which now serves all three merged elementaries, are impressed by the most recent cohort of 6th graders. They were the first to attend a merged school in 5th grade and arrived in junior high more unified socially and academically than any group before them.
In-school suspensions for 6th grade were cut in half. Discipline referrals dropped by about a third.
In general, research has found that more diverse schools tend to have a positive impact on the academic and/or social growth of all students.
For instance, a 2015 report by the National Center for Education Statistics found that white students at low-diversity schools perform about as well as white students at more diverse schools. Black students, particularly Black males, however, tend to achieve stronger results at more diverse schools than at schools where more than 60% of children are Black.
What’s more, diverse classrooms promote critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving, for all students, a 2019 report from the Century Foundation concluded.
