Exclusive Data: Thousands of schools at risk of closing due to enrollment loss

Days before Christmas, the school board in Jackson, Mississippi, voted to close 11 schools and merge two more — a drastic move that parents in the district had long feared. Some on the list have lost 30% or more of their students since 2018.

Despite the district’s high poverty, Superintendent Errick Greene said he could no longer afford to staff social workers and counselors at schools with long stretches of declining enrollment. Many older buildings were falling apart. It made no sense, he said, to have plumbers and HVAC technicians “racing hither and yon across the city” each morning to keep them running.

“Should we really be investing this money in these school buildings if they’re at best at half capacity?” he asked.

Courtey of Jackson Public Schools

Jackson Public Schools Superintendent Errick Greene has focused on school improvement since arriving in 2018. Enrollment continues to decline, but the district’s rating has increased from an F to a C.

Such questions are weighing heavily on district leaders throughout the country. Fresh from the academic struggles that followed the pandemic, and with federal relief funds soon to run out, they now confront a massive enrollment crisis.

Districts from Philadelphia to Los Angeles have large numbers of schools that lost at least 20% of their students during the pandemic.

“I’m not surprised people didn’t want to talk about this until last fall,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant. “There was always hope that the kids were coming back.”

But most have not — part of a decline that is projected to continue throughout the decade. Oregon, New Mexico and West Virginia are among the states expected to see enrollment drop at least another 10%.

A new analysis of national enrollment data, prepared by researchers at the Brookings Institution and augmented by reporting from The 74, offers the most detailed look to date at how the crisis is playing out at the school level, as well as the districts that face — or will soon face — tough decisions about closures and cuts.

DATA ANALYSIS

‘Enrollment Declines are Everywhere’

Percent of district schools with decline of 20% or more

In an October paper, Brookings researchers found that over a four-year period that includes the pandemic, about 12% of elementary schools and 9% of middle schools lost at least one-fifth of their enrollment. At The 74’s request, they expanded that data to include all 4,428 schools in the country that reached or exceeded a 20% decline.

The results were sobering: “Enrollment declines are everywhere,”  said Sofoklis Goulas, a fellow at Brookings.

In the years leading up to COVID lockdowns, fewer than 2,000 of the nation’s roughly 98,000 schools saw decreases on the level of Jackson. That number more than doubled between 2019 and 2021.

Among districts with over 50,000 students, those with the greatest share of schools that declined by 20% or more are concentrated in the South. They include Memphis-Shelby in Tennessee, the Dekalb County schools near Atlanta and several in Texas. Other large and mid-size districts topping the list include Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Albuquerque and the Granite Public Schools in Utah.

“The first place where these logistical and financial pressures will show up is the school,” he said.

Many of the those facing such pressures are clustered in some of the nation’s largest districts, among them:

• Clark County, Nevada, where 33 of its more than 300 schools, most of them elementary, saw a 20% loss between 2019 and 2021. Further declines last school year translated to a nearly $33 million reduction in state funds.

• Tucson, Arizona, where 15% of its 82 schools lost a fifth or more of their students. Observers say the state’s robust school choice climate is a contributing factor.

• Kansas City, Missouri, which closed two elementary schools last school year, one of which saw at least a 20% drop in enrollment after the pandemic. Five more schools have seen similar declines.

‘The future is uncertain’

Because of its size, California has the most schools where enrollment loss hit at least 20% during the pandemic — over 1,400. High-priced areas like Silicon Valley reflect a host of recent demographic trends, including record-low birth rates and a limited housing market. Other families left districts during school closures for private schools and charters.  All of these factors add up to fewer school-age children attending traditional public schools.

“I think a lot of coastal California looks like this,” said Todd Collins, a school board member in the Palo Alto Unified system.

Big Districts, Big Declines

Large school systems with the heaviest concentrations of schools with plummeting enrollment

District Name	2021-22 Enrollment	Total Schools	Number of schools with 20% decline	Share of schools with 20% decline
Granite School District, UT	59,246	67	18	27%
School District of Philadelphia, PA	112,409	198	49	25%
Albuquerque Public Schools, NM	80,151	151	36	24%
Los Angeles Unified School District, CA	434,178	609	125	21%
Seattle Public Schools, WA	50,700	86	18	21%
New York City Public Schools, NY	801,363	1399	270	19%
Aldine Independent School District, TX	58,198	50	8	16%
Milwaukee Public Schools, WI	61,452	136	21	15%
Houston Independent School District, TX	182,502	256	35	14%
Jeffco Public Schools, CO	74,551	141	20	14%
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, NC	140,214	163	21	13%
Northside Independent School District, TX	98,240	109	14	13%
Austin Independent School District, TX	70,424	105	14	13%
Fort Worth Independent School District, TX	70,154	115	15	13%
Memphis-Shelby County Schools, TN	102,209	108	13	12%
Klein Independent School District, TX	51,618	34	4	12%
Miami-Dade County Public Schools, FL	320,598	428	48	11%
Duval County Public Schools, FL	126,548	165	18	11%
Denver Public Schools, CO	84,101	154	17	11%
Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, NC	52,022	70	8	11%
Clark County School District, NV	302,352	328	33	10%
San Diego Unified School District, CA	94,996	164	15	9%
Jefferson County School District, KY	92,288	132	12	9%
Washoe County School District, NV	64,610	56	5	9%

Based on data from the National Center on Education Statistics, the chart reflects districts with over 50,000 students, ranked in order according to those with the largest concentration of schools that lost at least 20% of their enrollment between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 years. The total number of schools excludes those that added or eliminated grade levels, or opened or closed during the time period studied.

Small districts disrupted

In small schools, even a slight change in staffing or enrollment can be disruptive. Leah Russin‘s son Leo began the year in a combined fourth-fifth grade class at Barron Park Elementary in the Palo Alto district because there weren’t enough students for two classrooms.

Two weeks into the school year, the 230-student school added a teacher and Leo changed classes.

Russin said despite the staff’s “incredible shuffling and gymnastics,” the instability was stressful. When Leo’s teacher assigned a nonfiction essay, “he wrote about the anxiety of not knowing if his friends were going to be in his class and if he was going to like his teacher.”

Courtesy of Leah Russin

Leah Russin’s son Leo on his first day of fourth grade at Barron Park Elementary.

Russin and other parents have written letters to the school board advocating for at least two classrooms per grade, even if classes are small.

“We know that means more dollars per student,” she said. “But we believe that means that you are just giving our kids equal opportunity to access the education that kids in a more stable school get.”

Despite the enrollment decline, Collins said the district isn’t planning imminent closures and hopes city planners’ proposals for more affordable housing become a reality, drawing in more families.

“The future is uncertain,” he said. “The current trend is clearly down, but that could change quickly.”

Can development of housing units help?

Plans to build apartments near single-family homes often draw strong opposition from residents worried about traffic and property values. Last year, a developer proposed to demolish an old boutique hotel in Barron Park and put up a six-story complex. But the neighborhood association complained it would be too big and the city council said it would likely reject the plan. In hopes of winning approval, the developer has since revised the project to offer a mixture of apartments, townhomes and hotel rooms.

Restricting multi-family housing to particular zones “makes the city more segregated and separated,” Russin said. “I’m one of the people who strongly advocates for more housing at every income level.”

About a half hour away, the Cupertino district isn’t waiting for families to return. The board closed three schools at the end of last school year.

Federal funds delayed closures

Many districts with declining enrollment have been able to delay closures by relying on federal relief funds to offset the loss in state funding. Some states have also used that money to lure back students who stopped attending during the pandemic.

Washington state officials, for example, put nearly $5 million toward reaching students who had become “completely disengaged” from school. In December, Superintendent Chris Reykdal credited the program with contributing to a small increase of 2,000 students statewide.

Sheila Fitzgerald/Shutterstock

Plans to close some Oakland Unified schools in 2022 sparked protests and a hunger strike. The district changed course, but enrollment is still declining.

But even with the uptick, statewide enrollment languishes below pre-pandemic levels. “The scariest part is that there’s really no light on the horizon,” Eschbacher said.

If a bright spot is to be found, he said, it could be that “districts are getting better at talking about this.”

He pointed to Indianapolis and Colorado’s Jeffco Public Schools — both of which recently closed multiple schools — as examples of how to communicate “the student experience.”

But even the most clearly-articulated plans won’t keep closures from being a bitter pill for most parents to swallow.

It can be particularly tough for those with close ties to the institutions. “We’re the South. The center of our neighborhoods are churches and schools,” said Brooke Floyd, who leads a nonprofit community organization in Jackson.

Research shows that high-poverty, minority neighborhoods like those in Jackson are more affected by the decline — and eventual school closures — than those in middle-class communities. Goulas, from Brookings, found that enrollment was more likely to bounce back at schools serving well-off families, while the numbers continued to drop at those with higher poverty.

For Floyd, it’s personal. Chastain Middle School, where she attended as a student, is one of the 13 schools closing. Oak Forest Elementary, where she taught third grade until 2017, was on the chopping block until community members pushed back.

Courtesy of Brooke Floyd

Brooke Floyd’s children attend a Montessori school in Jackson that will likely absorb some of the students from schools that are closing.

Leaders announcing closures often talk about “reimagining” schools — or, as Greene labeled his plan in Jackson, “optimizing for equity.” But Floyd said parents should make sure the district follows through.

“If that’s what they’re going to push toward us, then we’re going to have to hold them accountable,” she said. “We’re going to have to remind them they promised that our schools were about to be amazing.”

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Linda Jacobson is a California-based senior writer for The 74, covering Congress, policy, courts, early education and more. Previously, Jacobson reported on  education at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Education Dive. She was also a reporter and associate editor at Education Week, and served as assistant director of the Education Writers Association.

“This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.”