Fort Worth Star-Telegram (TX)
As officials in the Fort Worth Independent School District study the possibility of closing down some campuses due to enrollment declines, the district is just one of many nationwide facing that prospect. “You have to be student-centered and student-focused, and then people-focused,” said Edgar Palacios, founder of an education advocacy group in Kansas City,...
As officials in the
As more districts are forced to consider shuttering some of their schools to save on costs, education experts and community members affected by school closures say it’s critical that district leaders invite the parents and others into the process as early as possible, and to make sure any decisions are made based on what’s best for students and communities, not only with finances in mind.
“You have to be student-centered and student-focused, and then people-focused,” said
Fort Worth ISD board approves facilities study
Last September, Fort Worth ISD’s board approved a
The district’s enrollment declined by about 17% between 2016 and last year, a trend that was driven by a number of factors, including increased competition from charter schools, the cost of housing in Fort Worth’s urban core and birth rates that never fully recovered after the Great Recession.
District leaders say those enrollment declines have left many campuses under-enrolled.
Schools across the
If Fort Worth ISD does end up closing campuses, it wouldn’t be the only district in the country faced with that decision. Last month, the district appeared on a list of two dozen school districts at highest risk of campus closures published by the education news site The 74. All districts on the list had heavy concentrations of schools that lost 20% or more of their enrollment between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years.
In a paper published in October, Goulas and a colleague noted that there has been a sharp uptick in the number of students who have left traditional school districts for private schools, homeschooling or some other non-public option since 2019. At the same time, charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated, continued the steady growth they’ve seen over the past two decades. If those trends continue, Goulas said, it will continue to put financial pressure on public school districts, likely forcing more of them to consider closing campuses.
Do school closures really save money?
When school districts decide to close campuses, they typically do so for one of three reasons, said
Districts that close campuses often don’t save as much money as they anticipate, Green said. That’s at least in part because maintaining those buildings continues to cost money, even if districts don’t hold classes in them, he said — districts have to pay for security to make sure those buildings aren’t vandalized, for example. Many districts also find their transportation costs increase when they close campuses because they have to bus students farther to school every day, he said.
Typically, the only way districts save a substantial amount of money when they close schools is if they have massive layoffs at the same time, Green said. For most districts, payroll makes up the majority of the budget. If districts move most of the teachers and support staff from a shuttered campus to other schools in the district, those salaries are still on the books.
Research suggests that school closures often leave students worse off academically, as well. A 2017 study from Stanford University’s
But when districts close campuses, most students end up going to schools that are performing worse than the ones they left, the study indicated. For the study, researchers looked at school closures in 26 states between 2006 and 2013. During that period, a little less than half of the students who were displaced by school closures in those states landed in schools that were stronger academically than the ones they attended before the closures, researchers wrote.
Students who move to a new school after their home campus closes also tend to be more likely to have attendance problems, Green said. Research suggests that students who feel that there are adults at their school who know them and care about them are less likely to be chronically absent. But when students move to a new campus, they lose the relationships they had with teachers and staff at their old schools.
That lack of relationships, combined with the fact that most students will have to travel farther to their new schools, can lead many to rack up more absences than they did before the change, Green said. Students who miss too many school days are at greater risk of a host of academic consequences, including dropping out of high school and struggling to read on grade level.
Green said there are steps districts can take to soften the blow of school closures. District leaders need to invite the community into the process from the beginning, he said. Parents, grandparents and students have lived experience in the communities those schools serve that district officials generally don’t have, he said, so they have better insight into what roles those campuses play in their communities. District leaders need to take community input seriously and act on it when appropriate, he said.
Community feedback was instrumental in changing plans for school closures in another major urban school district last year. In
After community outcry, the district’s board paused that plan and voted in
The biggest problem with the district’s original plan was that officials didn’t communicate it well, said Palacios, founder of the Latinx Educational Collaborative, a
Another issue was that the burden of school closures fell almost completely on Black and Hispanic communities, Palacios said. Nearly all of the schools slated for closure were located east of
In the months that followed, Palacios said, the district has done a better job of communicating with families. Part of the difference could be due to a change in leadership, he said —
Even though the district backed off on its initial plans to shutter 10 campuses, the two closures it ended up making were still hard for families whose kids went to those schools. Rebecca Sundquist’s two kids went to
Sunquist said their family lives only about two blocks away from Longfellow, which made morning drop-offs and afternoon pick-ups convenient. Sundquist had also volunteered at Longfellow for several years, so she knew most of the teachers and how the campus worked.
In the last months of last school year, after the district announced it would close Longfellow over the summer, several teachers at the school resigned, Sundquist said. Her son, then a third-grader, was in a class of about 30 students. The class’ assistant teacher left before the end of the year, leaving the teacher to manage 30 kids on her own, she said. The teacher handled the situation as well as she could, Sundquist said, but none of the kids got as much one-on-one help.
The last two years have been tough for Sundquist’s kids. Most of her son’s friends from Longfellow went to other schools following the change, she said, so he feels alone at his new school. Her daughter, who’s now a second-grader, was more traumatized by the evacuation after the carbon monoxide leak at Longfellow, Sundquist said, so she was ready to say goodbye to the old building and move somewhere new.
Looking back on the school closure process, Sundquist said she wishes the district had done a better job of communicating with families last year, so the decision didn’t take as many people by surprise. She also wishes the district had built new campuses to consolidate under-enrolled schools before they closed buildings down. That way, students who had to relocate could start over together in a new school instead of being dropped into another under-enrolled campus and having to learn new rules, routines and procedures that other kids already knew, she said.
But mostly, she said, she’s sorry the school closures had to happen at all.
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