The Unequal Effects of School Closings (2024)

By Alec MacGillis, reporter at ProPublica

In the 1990s, when Liberia descended into civil war, the Kpor family fled to Ivory Coast. A few years later, in 1999, they were approved for resettlement in the United States and ended up in Rochester, New York. Janice Kpor, who was 11 at the time, jokingly wonders whether her elders were under the impression that they were moving to New York City. What she remembers most about their arrival is the trees: It was May, yet many were only just starting to bud. “It was, like, ‘Where are we?’” she said. “It was completely different.”

But the Kpors adapted and flourished. Janice lived with her father in an affordable-housing complex close to other family members, and she attended the city’s public schools before enrolling in St. John Fisher University, just outside the city, where she got a bachelor’s degree in sociology and African American studies. She found work as a social service case manager and eventually started running a group home for disabled adults.

She also became highly involved in the schooling of her three children, whom she was raising with her partner, the father of the younger two, a truck driver from Ghana. Education had always been highly valued in her family: One of her grandmothers had been a principal in Liberia, and her mother, who remained there, is a teacher. Last fall, when school started, Kpor was the president of the parent-teacher organization at School 10, the Dr. Walter Cooper Academy, where her youngest child, Thomasena, was in kindergarten. Her middle child had also attended the school.

Kpor took pleasure in dropping by the school, a handsome two-story structure that was built in 1916 and underwent a full renovation and expansion several years ago. The school was in the 19th Ward, in southwest Rochester, a predominantly Black, working- and middle-class neighborhood of century-old homes. The principal, Eva Thomas, oversaw a staff that prided itself on maintaining a warm environment for 299 students, from kindergarten through sixth grade, more than 90% of whom were Black or Latino. Student artwork filled the hallways, and parent participation was encouraged. School 10 dated only to 2009 — the building had housed different programs before that — but it had strong ties to the neighborhood, owing partly to its namesake, a pioneering Black research scientist who, at the age of 95, still made frequent visits to speak to students. “When parents chose to go to this particular school, it was because of the community that they have within our school, the culture that they have,” Kpor told me.

Because she was also engaged in citywide advocacy, through a group called the Parent Leadership Advisory Council, Kpor knew that the Rochester City School District faced major challenges. Enrollment had declined from nearly 34,000 in 2003 to less than 23,000 last year, the result of flight to the suburbs, falling birth rates and the expansion of local charter schools, whose student population had grown from less than 2,000 to nearly 8,000 during that time. Between 2020 and 2022, the district’s enrollment had dropped by more than 10%.

The situation in Rochester was a particularly acute example of a nationwide trend. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic,public school enrollment has declined by about a million students, and researchersattribute the dropto families switching to private schools — aided by an expansion of voucher programs in many red and purple states — and to homeschooling, which has seen especially strong growth. In addition, as of last year, anestimated 50,000 students are unaccounted for— many of them are simply not in school.

During the pandemic, Rochester kept its schools closed to in-person instruction longer than any other district in New York besides Buffalo, and throughout the country some of the largest enrollment declines have come in districts that embraced remote learning. Some parents pulled their children out of public schools because they worried about the inadequacy of virtual learning; others did so, after the eventual return to school, because classroom behavior had deteriorated following the hiatus. In these places, a stark reality now looms: schools have far more space than they need, with higher costs for heating and cooling, building upkeep and staffing than their enrollment justifies. During the pandemic, the federal government gave $190 billion to school districts, but that money is about to run dry. Even some relatively prosperous communities face large drops in enrollment: In Ann Arbor, Michigan, whereenrollment has fallen by more than 1,000 studentssince the fall of 2019, the city is planning to lay off some 90 teachers; Santa Clara, which is part of Silicon Valley,has seen a decrease of 14% in a decade.

On Sept. 12, 2023, less than a week after the school year started, Rochester’s school board held what appeared to be a routine subcommittee meeting. The room was mostly empty as the district’s superintendent, Carmine Peluso,presented what the district called a “reconfiguration plan.”

A decade earlier, 2,600 kindergarten students had enrolled in Rochester’s schools — roughly three-quarters of the children born in the city five years before. But in recent years, Peluso said, that proportion had sunk to about half.

Within 10 years, Peluso said, “if we continue on this trend and we don’t address this, we’re going to be at a district of under 14,000 students.” The fourth-largest city in New York, with a relatively stable population of about 210,000, was projecting that its school system would soon enroll only about a third of the city’s current school-age population.

Peluso then recommended that the Rochester school district close 11 of its 45 schools at the end of the school year. Kpor, who was watching the meeting online, was taken aback. Five buildings would be shuttered altogether; the other six would be put to use by other schools in the district.