Urban school districts grapple with under-resourced schools, emotional closures in the face of plummeting enrollment
Hilda L. Solis Learning Academy is down to 170 students.
By Sara Randazzo and Matt Barnum | Photographs by Zaydee Sanchez for The Wall Street Journal
May 9, 2024 5:30 am ET
LOS ANGELES—In a huge city awash with tiny schools, few are smaller than the Hilda L. Solis Learning Academy.
The public high school, housed in a former hospital in East Los Angeles, is down to 170 students from the surrounding Latino neighborhoods. On a hallway bulletin board, handwritten hearts display reasons students love the school, including, “how everyone knows each other” and “the fact that school is small.”
The school’s size, beloved by many families, will also be its demise. Los Angeles Unified School District is closing Solis this summer, citing declining enrollment that has severely limited the school’s offerings. Students can take the basic classes needed to graduate but have few options for electives or advanced coursework. The only after-school activities are weightlifting and a Bible club.
“I know financially the district can’t afford this, I see how much our enrollment has dropped,” math teacher Melina Gutierrez said, tears welling in her eyes on a recent day as she looked around her longtime classroom. “But the small school is a great thing for kids.”
Solis math teacher Melina Gutierrez works with student Danny Casas.
Solis’s closure is an omen of what could be coming to more schools in Los Angeles and cities across the country. And it reflects a difficult-to-sustain dynamic: too many schools for too few students.
As birthrates have dipped, families have moved elsewhere, and public school alternatives have grown, many urban districts have hemorrhaged students. That has left officials with the difficult choice of keeping open shrinking schools with resources spread thin or shutting them down, a move that inevitably garners fierce community backlash. How school leaders navigate this challenge could define urban school systems for the next several years.
The pandemic accelerated trends that were already in motion in some cities.
Between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school year, urban schools lost nearly 850,000 students, or 5.5% of enrollment, according to an analysis of the most recent federal data by the Brookings Institution, done at The Wall Street Journal’s request. During that time, the number of school buildings has remained virtually unchanged—leaving more hollowed-out schools.
Smaller schools can come with real benefits. In the early 2000s, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supported the creation of small high schools—with no more than 600 students—in cities across the country. Research found that these schools helped more students earn a diploma.
But if schools get too small they face a paradoxical problem: Costs per student tend to rise, but programming tends to shrink. With a critical mass of students, a school can afford a richer set of extracurricular activities and classes and employ a greater array of staff, such as a nurse, librarian and art teacher.
“When schools get below a certain size threshold, they start facing these unique challenges that make it hard to deliver a high-quality education,” said Joseph Trawick-Smith, a consultant to school districts with the nonprofit Education Resource Strategies.
Closing schools, though, is educationally and politically fraught. Families typically like their local schools and fear disruption to their child’s education. Teachers don’t want to lose their jobs. Community members worry closed schools will sit vacant and be a source of crime and blight.
“Everybody wants to keep their school because our schools are personal,” said Jeanelle Foster, the former board chair of the St. Paul, Minn., district. “They become part of our family, they’re our community.”
Foster voted in 2021 to close or merge several schools the district deemed unsustainably small. The closure decision sparked bitter protests. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do,” Foster said.
San Antonio Independent School District in Texas said in the fall that 15 schools will close next year.
Money is being doled out unevenly because of the fixed costs needed to run a school, regardless of its enrollment. The smallest elementary school in San Antonio costs $14,041 per student, compared with $7,109 at the largest one. “The only way to provide all the resources our kids need is by taking money from somewhere else,” Superintendent Jaime Aquino said.
Student mental-health crises aren’t timed to the one day a week a school has a counselor, he said, and teachers struggle to teach multi-grade classrooms necessitated by low enrollment.
The district—where enrollment is down 29% from 1998—is pitching the community on the plans with the slogan “rightsizing with heart.”
“We have been preparing for this as if we were going to the battlefield,” Aquino said. He doubts this will be the last round of closures.
In Inglewood, Calif., a largely Black and Latino city just south of Los Angeles, a group of students walked out of classes at Morningside High School in April—despite threats of suspension—to protest the school’s slated closure. They joined alumni and community activists on the sidewalk to rail against the recent announcement that five of the district’s 16 schools will close or relocate by the end of next school year.
Students and others protested outside Morningside High School in Inglewood, Calif., over of the planned closure of the school next year. PHOTO: AXEL KOESTER
“It’s part of our community, it’s something generations of us have grown up with,” said Evelyn Perez, a Morningside senior, as planes from nearby LAX airport roared overhead. “Passing by and not seeing Morningside…it wouldn’t even feel like Inglewood anymore.”
The school is down to 465 students from highs above 1,600 two decades ago.
Alumna Carliss Bell, who attended in the 1980s alongside future NFL and WNBA athletes, said students shouldn’t have to travel across the city to the schools that will remain open. “They live right here,” Bell said. “They can walk home if they feel sick or don’t have enough money for lunch.”
The protesters targeted their ire at James Morris, a white educator who was brought in last year as the district’s eighth leader since the state took over Inglewood schools because of financial mismanagement in 2012.
Three miles away from the protesters that day at the district office, Morris laid out the case for the closures. Each closed elementary school will save around $500,000, he estimates. Students aren’t well served, he said, at a high school with an empty pool and where marching band uniforms donated by alumni go unused because there’s no band director.
“This is about building something better for kids,” said Morris, pointing to a Los Angeles Times article on the wall from 2000 about Inglewood elementary reading scores far outpacing other economically disadvantaged districts in the state. He said he’s trying to recapture that success and overcome the community’s skepticism.
Calculators in the classroom of math teacher Melina Gutierrez as students work through assignments.
Race plays a combustible role in these discussions. Schools with more students of color have historically been more likely to be closed, even accounting for other factors like enrollment, according to a recent national study.
In 2013, Chicago’s closure of 50 schools drew widespread opposition, and has left lingering resentment. The backlash was credited with nearly toppling then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel in his 2015 re-election bid. A University of Chicago study later found students from closed schools lost ground academically.
Enrollment at Chicago Public Schools dropped from about 400,000 in 2013 to 329,000 this school year. The district, which is currently switching from a mayoral-run system to an elected school board, is under a moratorium on school closures. A spokesperson said district officials won’t speculate on the possibility of closures but that the district is evaluating the needs of its hundreds of campuses and provides extra funding to support small schools.
In New York City, the country’s largest school system has seen pre-K to 12th grade enrollment fall from over one million students in 2017 to under 900,000 this school year.
Los Angeles Unified School District is closing Solis this summer, citing declining enrollment that has limited the school’s offerings.
NeQuan McLean, president of a local education council in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, said the neighborhood is struggling with under-enrolled schools, including an elementary school with 54 students and a middle school with fewer than 100. “We don’t have dance and art and music because we can’t afford it,” he said.
New York City schools chancellor David Banks acknowledges this problem. “We have dozens of schools that are around 100 kids,” he said. “You reach a point where it is so small that essentially you’re doing a disservice to kids.”
While the city recently closed or merged a handful of small schools, it hasn’t announced major restructuring plans.
In Los Angeles, home to the nation’s second-largest school system, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said he has been conveying a “high-level sense of urgency” around small schools. The district is down to 413,800 students across 800 schools, from nearly 750,000 students at its peak in 2003.
“At some point we need to ask communities impacted, would you rather have three very old, significantly under-enrolled schools or one shiny Taj Mahal?” Carvalho said. “You cannot have three beautiful, state-of-the-art schools that are all under-enrolled.”
Sparsely attended campuses would have been inconceivable in Los Angeles a few decades ago. From the 1980s to early 2000s, LAUSD gained national notoriety for overcrowded schools. Students competed for desks in packed classrooms and schools operated on year-round schedules. Some students boarded buses before dawn to head across the 710-square-mile district to schools with space. “It was just dreadful,” said LAUSD school board President Jackie Goldberg, who also served on the school board in the 1980s and early ’90s.
A massive building campaign followed. But by the time many of the schools opened a decade or more later, charter schools were gaining popularity and district enrollment was starting to decline. Today, nearly 109,000 students in Los Angeles attend charter schools, which are publicly funded but run independently from the district.
Hilda Solis Learning Academy—launched in 2012 with promises to house up to 600 students—never enrolled even 400. The Los Angeles school board voted to close Solis in March and move a nearby engineering magnet program—which has lacked a permanent home and also suffered from enrollment loss—into the building next school year.
Note: For LAUSD-run elementary, middle, and high schools open from 2010 through 2022. Years are for start of academic calendar.
Source: California Department of Education
Taylor Umlauf and Max Rust/WSJ
Gutierrez, the last of the founding teachers still on the Solis staff, bristled when district employees recently implied they could have tried harder to increase enrollment. The teachers did everything they could—hanging handmade banners, knocking on doors, sending mailers to middle-school households and hosting open houses.
Mary Beltran, the parent of a senior, comes to Solis every morning to volunteer, carefully stapling up new hallway displays and taking photos for the yearbook. She’s seen the number of classes and clubs shrink since her older daughter graduated in 2019. “Solis could have been much more,” she said.
Mary Beltran, shown with her daughter, student body president Kaitlyn Alejandre, volunteers at the school every morning.
Junior Juan Fausto has had friends leave the school for larger campuses, to join sports teams or Junior ROTC programs. “We don’t have the big events, but the one benefit we do have is we’re more connected with the teachers,” he said. He’s wary of what will happen next year, when students and staff from the magnet school, which has required student uniforms, take over the campus.
Solis’s closure is an exception in Los Angeles. Any consideration of large-scale school closures is at least a year away, Carvalho, the superintendent, said. Instead, the district is trying to attract families by rebranding neighborhood schools around a theme and staffing a hotline to help navigate enrollment, including a popular magnet-school lottery. The district has even given LAUSD-themed swag bags to new mothers at some local hospitals.
Enrollment losses slowed this year, Carvalho said, partly due to the expansion of a prekindergarten year for 4-year-olds. Los Angeles and other cities, including New York and Chicago, have also seen an influx of migrant students, which has stabilized enrollment in all three cities for the first time in years.
But an enrollment bounceback appears unlikely. LAUSD’s own budget office projects further enrollment declines of under 3% a year for the next two years and census data shows a dwindling number of young children in Los Angeles County.
The hallways of Hilda L Solis Learning Academy are filled with art.
Similar declines have been seen elsewhere as families with young children have left large cities and fertility rates have fallen nationally. The U.S. Department of Education projects that by the end of the decade, the nation’s public schools, which currently educate nearly 50 million students, will lose another two million students.
Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab, a school finance research center, said there is little districts can do about demographic shifts. “At that point it’s like, all right, well, why don’t you fix up the young people and tell them to have more kids,” she said.
Los Angeles school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin said she wishes the board and district would address the challenge of small schools head-on rather than holding out hope and treating school closures like a third rail. She has tallied 115 schools in the district that have 200 students or fewer.
“If we never talk about closing schools, we’re keeping options from the next students who are coming in,” Ortiz Franklin said.
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