School closures rarely deliver expected savings
At Glen Cove Elementary in Vallejo, Penny was adjusting to a new school after her previous elementary school closed. Weeks into the academic year, she still struggled with the transition, though she had started to make new friends. She said she felt comfortable on campus and liked her teacher, a first-year educator who had joined Vallejo’s teacher residency program. The program launched last year to attract new educators and improve retention. With 32 children in the class, Penny said it was hard to concentrate. On a Tuesday in October, her mother, Kimberly Núñez-Brandão, received a note in the Glen Cove parent portal: Penny’s teacher had resigned, effective immediately. The district said the school would rely on a long-term substitute for now.
For thousands of students across the U.S., the transition involved attending an entirely new school after the previous one closed. The Associated Press is covering school closures with The Hechinger Report and Big Local News at Stanford University. Big Local News counted 1,156 U.S. school closures during the last academic year — the highest number since the pandemic — in an analysis of federal data. As U.S. birth rates have declined over several decades and state and federal education funding has come under pressure, an increasing number of districts have turned to campus closures to reduce spending.
Enrollment has fallen faster than the number of schools. An Associated Press analysis of federal education data collected by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee and sociologist Jaymes Pyne found that public school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students, roughly 3%, between fall 2019 and 2024. The total number of schools has declined, too, but only to about pre-pandemic levels, the researchers found, suggesting closures are lagging enrollment losses.
The Associated Press reported that lower birth rates were the primary reason for the enrollment decline. It also cited intensified federal immigration enforcement and the post-pandemic expansion of private school vouchers and homeschool options as contributing factors. Bellwether and WestEd, two research groups, recently estimated that declining enrollment could cause schools to lose $11.5 billion in state revenue annually by 2030-2031, potentially prompting widespread layoffs, cuts to academic programs and school closures. The Associated Press closure reporting said the enrollment decline suggested additional financial decisions ahead for districts.
Vallejo City Unified School District illustrates the pressures facing one system. The working-class district near San Francisco serves half as many students as it did two decades earlier. Leaders have closed five campuses since 2025, a quarter of the district’s schools, and have placed up to one-third of all staff positions at risk to help address a $36 million deficit. According to the district, enrollment fell from nearly 18,000 in the fall of 2006 to about 9,300. Vallejo continues to deal with the effects of the closure of a naval base in the 1990s. Large school systems in Cleveland, Houston and Philadelphia are also facing similar closures.
The enrollment and financial situation is unlikely to improve, said Lydia Rainey, research principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “States aren’t about to open the coffers and swoop in with additional funds to save schools,” she said.
Research cited in the Associated Press reporting says school closures rarely produce the financial relief districts seek. Busing students to reassigned schools, severance for pink-slipped staff and security for empty facilities often consume any savings.
Closures can also set students back academically and make it harder to attract teachers, who may worry that the jobs are not stable.
The Associated Press reported that closing schools can prompt families to choose charter or private schools or other districts. In Vallejo, some parents said they had chosen to homeschool this fall or were planning to sell their homes and move to neighboring districts. “Families are literally packing up their kids and moving away,” said Vallejo mother Kimberly Núñez-Brandão, whose daughter’s elementary school closed. At a curriculum night at Glen Cove, Núñez-Brandão shared her shock at learning that Penny’s new fifth-grade teacher had 32 students in his first class. “They already overwhelmed teachers with 30-plus students,” she said. “Who’s winning here?”
Rubén Aurelio, superintendent for Vallejo schools, acknowledged that cuts and closures can be hard for families but said they are necessary because districts and budgets were designed for a different reality. “We’re not just closing schools to close schools,” Aurelio said. “We’re right-sizing a district that was built for significantly more kids. And if we’re going to actually improve outcomes for the kids we still have, we need to concentrate resources.”
The Associated Press reported that Vallejo’s cost-cutting may push even more families into competing charter networks, neighboring districts or private alternatives, further eroding the funding schools receive per enrolled student. Alongside the budget cuts, Vallejo is renovating older campuses in an effort to draw younger parents who cannot afford to start a family in San Francisco. Aurelio said he plans to open a Tagalog-language school soon, targeting Filipino families from across the Bay Area.
Marisa de la Torre, a managing director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, said instability created by school closures may last for a while. Studies from the University of Chicago show that displaced students often experience long-term drops in reading and math. That is especially true when students end up at low-performing schools. “It takes a while to recover, if they recover at all,” she said. Núñez-Brandão was not sure she wanted to stick around long enough to find out.
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