More public schools are closing. Will the midterms speed or slow the process?

Public school closures are accelerating across the country, and voters in several states have a chance to speed up or slow down the process on Tuesday. 

Closures are largely determined by school board members and affected by a district’s funding situation, which itself is downstream from state legislatures and governors’ mansions. 

With school board seats up for grab and more than 12 states with ballot initiatives affecting school funding, these midterms could bring some relief to parents dissatisfied with plans to shut down more school buildings. 

“This is one of the least popular things a district can do, and so it would be very difficult for a candidate to run on a pro-closure platform. On the other hand, you do have some candidates who have said, “We have steep, declining enrollment. We need to align the number of schools we have with the number of students we have. We need to shrink to match our circumstances,'” said Carrie Hahnel, a partner at Bellwether, an education research nonprofit.  

“It’ll be interesting to see if there are communities that are sympathetic to that,” Hahnel added. 

The enrollment crisis is a problem across the country, affecting major cities including Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle.  

Researchers found public schools lost 1.83 million students between the 2019-2020 school year and the 2023-2024 one, a shift fueled by the pandemic. 

The National Center for Education Statistics projects public school enrollment will drop 7.5 percent from 2019 to 2031.  

And there is not much districts can do about it as most of the decline is from falling birth rates in the U.S., although some is also coming from shifts in education and greater participation in school choice programs.  

Since enrollment is directly linked to funding, schools start to feel the pinch in their pockets pretty quickly. 

Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), a district that serves more than 29,000 students, tabled plans to talk about school closures until next year after years of funding declines took away popular programs and fears of immigration enforcement have impacted........

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