Ask any superintendent to name the most difficult and controversial decisions they’re faced with, and it’s almost certain that school closures will rank high on the list.
It’s also a possibility that is increasingly on districts’ radars as enrollment in many places declines and the infusion of federal funds that temporarily bolstered school budgets in recent years has come to an end.
As these challenges converge, many districts are considering whether to cut down their building portfolios to save money. Oftentimes, districts’ smaller, under-enrolled schools find themselves in the crosshairs.
But enrollment shouldn’t be the only factor driving school closure decisions, according to a school finance expert who has studied the topic. Instead, leaders should take into account academic performance, broader community needs, and whether closing buildings will actually save money, especially when districts are contemplating closures specifically in an effort to offset looming budget deficits.
Marguerite Roza, a research professor and director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, advised against a “formula” or “fill-in-the-blank mentality” to maintaining school facilities.
Not every school needs to have the same staffing and course offerings, she said, and enrollment alone shouldn’t be the determining factor in a school closure. Small schools can be financially viable, she said.
“We could just say, ‘Is the school successful with kids, and is it financially viable?’” Roza said. “And, if not, regardless of the size, let’s consider closing that one.”
Will school closures actually save money?
Closing schools generally doesn’t save districts a lot of money, so shuttering campuses isn’t the best move if the goal is to save a buck.
The Edunomics Lab, which analyzes education finance and models district spending decisions, has found that when a district has under-enrolled schools, closing 1 of every 15 campuses saves only about 4 percent of a district’s budget, with most of the savings coming from reductions in labor costs.
The biggest chunk of district money, after all, is spent on teachers, and those staff members typically are still needed, just at different locations.
And even when a school building is closed and students and staff move elsewhere, the building itself still costs money. A district has to pay for some maintenance on shuttered buildings so they don’t become neighborhood eyesores. And the process of closing a building costs money.
It can also be difficult to offload those unused buildings. Shuttered schools are oftentimes undesirable to businesses for some of the same reasons districts decided to close them: They’re often located in areas that are losing population, experts say. Also, they tend to be in poor condition, and it may be hard to modify them for other uses.
Still, a district with declining enrollment could get to a point where it can’t sustain all the facilities it has—especially if it’s attempting to keep staffing and academic offerings uniform across all its campuses, Roza said.
“In that situation, as your enrollment drops, you’re spreading your resources kind of thin across a lot of schools,” she said. “Because you’re trying to prop up these one-per-school positions, there’s a tradeoff for the entire district to sustain these smaller schools.”
How will closures affect students’ academic performance and well-being?
Schools with higher percentages of students of color, especially Black students, are more likely to close than schools with populations with greater percentages of white students. Students whose schools close are often shuffled around and can struggle to find consistency in their education.
Academic research on school closures has found both short- and long-term consequences on students from shutting down their schools, so it’s important districts ensure students aren’t moved from schools with promising academic performance, experts say.
Not only are students of color more likely to see their schools close, but closures are more likely to have a damaging effect on their educational attainment than that of their peers.
In one study of Texas school closures, researcher Jeonghyeok Kim found a statistically significant drop in math and reading scores among students who went through a school closure in the years following the change. They were also absent on 1.8 percent more school days in the three years following the closure than the three years before. In addition, Kim found an increase in disciplinary action, including expulsions, out-of-school suspensions, and in-school suspensions, for bad behavior following school closures.
All of these effects were more pronounced among students of color and economically disadvantaged students. Attendance among Hispanic students whose schools closed took a bigger hit after the shutdown than it did among other student populations. Black students and students from low-income families were disproportionately more likely to face more discipline.
Then, by age 26, the students who experienced school closures were 4.8 percent less likely to have attended college, 4.7 percent less likely to have completed college, and 1.3 percent less likely to be employed than their peers in schools with similar demographics and in similarly sized cities who did not experience a school closure. Annual earnings for those students from ages 25 to 27 were also 3.4 percent lower than their peers’.
When districts do close schools, Roza said, a “nonnegotiable” is that districts can’t close a building and send the affected students to a lower-performing school.
Closing a school is a big disruption to families, so it is critical that districts provide parents with some assurance that their children will be better off academically, Roza said.
Districts should also do what they can to smooth out the process, whether that’s reassigning cohorts of students to the same schools and even reassigning some of their teachers with them.
“The disruption is substantial enough that a little bit of accommodating those preferences can go a long way,” Roza said.
Should the broader community’s needs come first?
Schools are often neighborhood and community anchors, providing a crucial gathering place for social and cultural events. They’re also among the largest employers in an area.
So schools should be careful not to separate already disadvantaged communities—whether in rural areas or city neighborhoods—from a crucial lifeline.
“If we shut those school buildings down, those rural communities lose that source of social life and economic well-being,” Mara Casey Tieken, an associate professor of education at Bates College who has conducted research on the impacts of school closures, particularly in rural areas, told Education Week last year.
The Philadelphia district is one in the process of identifying schools that could close, hoping to cut down on the number of campuses so it can redeploy its resources to better effect—closing shrinking schools where it’s difficult to maintain a full slate of academic offerings and improving offerings at those that stay open.
Superintendent Tony Watlington Jr., said it’s a tricky balance to strike—honoring community needs while also being realistic and fiscally responsible—but the district intends to do all it can to make the least-harmful decisions, and support the affected communities when the time comes.
“On the one hand, schools have always been centers of communities in this nation, and Philadelphia is no different. When we think about investing in communities, those central institutions are part of that,” Watlington said. “Equity suggests to me that some school communities need more investment, regardless of the school size, and regardless of where the population is growing or declining.”
