Philadelphia’s school enrollment increased this year for the first time in a decade. But the long-term trend still points to a declining number of students attending schools in aging buildings—more of which might end up under capacity while others become overcrowded.
So, the 116,000-student, 220-building district is embarking on a yearlong process to assess which of its smaller, decades-old facilities might need to close, responding to an increasingly common bind for schools across America as they confront shrinking enrollments, tightening budgets, and aging infrastructure.
The exercise isn’t growing out of an immediate need to balance a deficit budget or respond to an abrupt enrollment dip, said Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr. And the goal isn’t to close any school immediately.
Instead, Watlington said, the district is hoping to cut down on the number of campuses so it can redeploy its resources to better effect—closing shrinking schools where it’s difficult to maintain a full slate of academic offerings and improving offerings at those that stay open.
District leaders hope those “more strategic and purposeful” choices can lead to improved academic and social-emotional success for students, Watlington said.
The approach will involve numerous community meetings as well as, potentially, the establishment of a minimum school size that could trigger reviews—but not automatic closures—of campuses that fall below it. Most of all, the district wants to move more slowly today than it did during a round of closures more than a decade ago. It doesn’t expect to release any closure recommendations until December, almost a year from now. And it doesn’t plan to make closure decisions based solely on enrollment.
“We’re on this endeavor with our community to identify what it will take for us to resolve or address these issues, and, at the end of the day, to ensure that we have modern school facilities that, quite frankly, provide better curricular access, better and more rigorous course access, more extracurricular and more technical education access for our students,” Watlington said. “We’ve got to give our families more, not less. That’s the whole point.”
Philadelphia’s situation illustrates the convergence of several common problems for school districts: declining enrollment, aging infrastructure, finances that grow tighter as districts get smaller, and a need to recover from a slide in academic achievement. Philadelphia’s slower, longer-term approach to deciding on closures could offer an example—albeit a large-scale one—for districts evaluating how many campuses they can sustain.
We've got to give our families more, not less. That’s the whole point.
Marguerite Roza, a research professor and director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, advised against a “formula” or “fill-in-the-blank mentality” to maintaining school facilities.
Not every school needs to have the same staffing and course offerings, she said, and enrollment alone shouldn’t be the determining factor in a school closure.
“We could just say, ‘Is the school successful with kids, and is it financially viable?’” Roza said. “And, if not, regardless of the size, let’s consider closing that one.”
Philly intends to apply lessons from a previous round of school closures
Closing schools generally doesn’t save districts a lot of money.
The Edunomics Lab, which analyzes education finance and models district spending decisions, estimates that when a district has under-enrolled schools, closing 1 of every 15 campuses saves only about 4 percent of a district’s budget, largely in labor costs.
Still, a district with declining enrollment could get to a point where it can’t sustain all the facilities it has—especially if it’s attempting to keep staffing and offerings uniform across all its campuses, Roza said.
“In that situation, as your enrollment drops, you’re spreading your resources kind of thin across a lot of schools,” she said. “So, you start cutting, and you think, ‘I guess I’ll get rid of some athletics,’ or decide to get rid of electives, or don’t raise pay for teachers.
“Because you’re trying to prop up these one-per-school positions, there’s a tradeoff for the entire district to sustain these smaller schools.”
But districts need to approach closures carefully.
In 2012, Philadelphia closed more than two dozen schools to stave off a massive budget shortfall. It was an “emergency situation,” and the closures achieved the outlined objective, Watlington said.
But there were tradeoffs.
Students whose schools closed and who were reassigned were disproportionately students of color.
Those students’ “academic and attendance outcomes got worse,” he said, confirming findings from academic research on school closures, which has found both short- and long-term consequences for students from shutting down their schools.
This time around, there’s no budget emergency, and there’s a desire to employ lessons from the 2012 closures: work more slowly, engage with more community members, and prioritize moving away from the most dilapidated buildings with the lowest enrollment.
“How do we structure our district so that we can roster and schedule classes so teachers in the district can provide more art, music, and physical education, provide more access to Algebra 1 in all of our middle schools, and can help us to provide more Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes, as well as more career and technical education to all of our students?” Watlington said.
The district plans to hold several community meetings and listening sessions with parents, local organizations, businesses, and elected officials to gather feedback before issuing its final recommendations for each school facility in December.
Philly is considering a minimum school size
The district is considering whether to establish a “minimum school size”—with details yet to be determined—that would trigger conversations about whether a school that doesn’t meet it should close.
When a school falls below the threshold—whatever that ends up being—it wouldn’t automatically close. But it would be a detail to inform the discussion, Watlington said.
The district would also take into account students’ academic performance at the school and other measures, he said.
“On the one hand, schools have always been centers of communities in this nation, and Philadelphia is no different. When we think about investing in communities, those central institutions are part of that,” Watlington said. “Equity suggests to me that some school communities need more investment, regardless of the school size, and regardless of where the population is growing or declining.”
Some research has looked into how school size affects learning, with one 2007 study landing on 600-900 students as the “ideal” size for a high school. Students at schools that were either smaller or larger learned less, the study found. The effects were greater in math than in reading, and greater on students of color and students from low-income families than others.
Still, it’s not a given that a small school should close, Roza said. But some changes could be inevitable.
In lieu of closure, Roza suggested alternative staffing models—sharing positions like principals, nurses, and librarians across multiple schools—or having some schools that don’t offer the same slate of classes and extracurricular activities as every other building.
That can be tough for some communities to stomach, though, so it’s important to make decisions with feedback from and collaboration with families, staff, and other community members, Roza said.
“Small schools can be financially viable, but they don’t look like big schools,” she said. “That’s where talking about it with the public to say, ‘Look, we could hold on to all these schools, but it’s not going to look like a school you have now’—I think that helps people understand the choice isn’t to keep everything the way it was or close my school, because there is no, ‘keep everything the way it was.’”
Closing a school is disruptive, but there are ways to limit the disruption
When districts do close schools, Roza said, a “nonnegotiable” should be that they can’t close a building and send the affected students to a lower-performing school.
Closing a school is a big disruption to families, so it is critical that districts provide parents with some assurance that their children will be better off academically, Roza said.
Districts should also do what they can to smooth out the process, whether that’s reassigning cohorts of students to the same schools and even reassigning some of their teachers to move with them.
“The disruption is substantial enough that a little bit of accommodating those preferences can go a long way,” Roza said.
In Philadelphia, Superintendent Watlington said he is committing to a process that’s as smooth as possible for affected families, students, and staff when the time comes.
“We know part of the work we have to do is to better utilize our limited resources, strategically use the additional resources we get, and develop a plan that our community can support and buy into,” he said. “We want to think very thoughtfully about how we’re doing this.”