Los Angeles Unified School District and Seattle Unified School District are among many urban school districts across the country that are closing schools due to lower student enrollment.
The operational expenses of running schools with dwindling student populations have caused administrators to cut educational offerings and get by with funding decreases. Cutting back can only go so far, and districts are making the tough decision to close schools to focus efforts and dollars to best effect.
Pandemic Accelerates Enrollment Decline
School enrollment has been declining in urban areas in the United States since 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic hastened the enrollment decline, with urban school districts losing 850,000 students between the 2019-2020 and 2022-2023 school years. Many of these students never returned, leading to many under-enrolled and financially strained schools.
Long-term Demographic Trends
While the COVID-19 pandemic surely hastened the decline, the demographic trends have been indicating the shift for much longer. Birth rates have been gradually lowering since the early 2000s, families tend to move out of urban environments once they have school-aged children, and homeschool and alternative schooling options are on the rise.
Urban Districts’ Dilemma
In school districts that operate many schools within relatively close proximity to one another, such as in urban environments, districts have to choose between maintaining smaller schools with fewer resources or closing some and consolidating to make resources stretch farther.
Community Opposition and Safety Concerns
As can be expected, there is often strong community opposition to school closures, and the cost of shutting down a school has implications beyond the financial—community support and morale, among other public safety concerns.
Disruption and Decay from Closures
For example, families and teachers often protest and oppose school closures due to the disruptions they cause to students and employees of the school. Additionally, an outcome of school closures is vacant buildings that are difficult to utilize and often become public hazards.
Benefits and Limitations of Small Schools
School size is a double-edged sword. While there are demonstrated benefits to a small school such as personalized attention and a community bond of familiarity, schools that are too small are not economically efficient and cannot offer the educational programs and opportunities that schools at a larger scale can sustain.
Economic Inefficiency in Small Schools
In San Antonio, Texas, a smaller scale urban school district, the district plans to shutter 15 schools. Coming out in advance of complaints from the public, the school district revealed the costs involved in running small versus large schools. In small schools, the cost per student was significantly higher than in large schools. The differential was largely due to operational and maintenance costs.
Cultural and Demographic Tensions in Inglewood
In many urban areas around the country, school districts often run afoul of demographic complaints when deciding which schools to close or keep open. In Inglewood, California, for example, the school district came under fire for undermining a local cultural community that would be harmed by closing local schools.
Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in School Closures
Race and socioeconomic complaints and concerns also weigh heavy on administrators in determining which schools should be consolidated or closed down. Statistically speaking, schools that have a student body comprised mainly of students of color are more likely to be closed than their whiter counterparts.
Pattern of Decline in Major Cities
These enrollment decreases occurring in New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Seattle, among others reveal a pattern of decline and subsequent closure and merger of smaller schools.
Economic Drivers of School Closures
While the decisions are usually driven by economic necessity to capitalize on using student dollars efficiently, the decisions are not easy and are usually accompanied by painful community disputes and challenges.
Strategic Consolidation in Los Angeles
There has been a massive shift from past concerns about overcrowded schools in cities to now concerns about under-enrollment. Superintendents across these inner city districts have, in almost all cases, settled on focusing resources on fewer but better-resourced schools, thereby aiming to retain educational quality over personalized attention.
Districts now expect protests at the decisions but are willing to work through the problems to enhance educational opportunities for the students.
Demographic Shifts and Future Projections
The demographic trends are unlikely to reverse and are in fact more likely to accelerate as urban areas are less affordable for families with children. Empty school buildings are just one more issue city planners are going to have to cope with in the post-COVID world where the urban landscape is already plagued by problems related to empty office buildings.
Inner city blight will only increase the demographic problems seen in urban schools, as fewer families may move into or remain in the city under such conditions.
