School Closures In Public Schools

In recent years there has been a greater population of students in schools around America. Though there is an increasing number of students there has been a decrease in numbers of public schools. In Chicago, New York, Detroit and many other cities across the country we have seen schools on top of schools closing down which has impacted many stakeholders most importantly staff and students (Vogt, 2013). Questions are raised on where will the staff and students go, how will the students be affected by this closure and many other important questions. There seems to be various views on school closures and if they have positive or negative effect on different stakeholders. Furthermore, the American public are also trying to understand what exactly

Looking at the number of students who have been affected by school closures you can see how there has been in increase in the past decade or so. In 1995-1996 there were about 900 students who were affected by school closures and in 2003-2004 there was about 2000 students who were affected by school closures (NCES, 2010). From the years 2000-2014 there were about 44 schools that were shut down in New York City (Kemple,2016). In May 2013 the Chicago Board of Education voted one closing 47 schools at one time which was the largest school closing in history (CCSR, 2015). There have been a dozen of schools that have closed in Detroit and there is also a push to have around 100 schools close in the upcoming years due to low performance. These are just a few of the many school closures that have happened across the country in the recent decades. School closures are also happening in Washington, Sacramento, Baltimore, Birmingham, and St. Louis (Vogt, 2013). The common theme we see is most of these school closures affect students with certain characteristics. The characteristics that these students have, are they receive free or reduced lunch, they receive special education services, they are most of the time made up of a minority population (CCSR, 2015). There are many protesters who believe these school closures are civil rights issue

The projected number of students in public schools in the year 2030 will increase by around 10 million according to the U.S Department of Education but these students will not evenly spread out across the nation (Lytton, 2011). A perfect example of this is the Dearborn Public School District and Detroit Public Schools District. Dearborn’s public school population has increased consistently over two decades while Detroit’s public schools has seen a constant decrease in enrollment over the years. While Dearborn’s public schools continues to grow in student population this also allows them to be financially strong and not have to worry about school closures rather think on how they will need to accommodate for new students. Detroit’s public schools however lost a significant number of students over the years which drastically affected the funding they were receiving and there expenses were much higher than the amount they were bringing in. Schools receive funding for each student and with Detroit’s school which used to accommodate many students, they are no longer being utilized fully caused a major financial burden. In the perfect world it is better for a school if their building is being over utilized rather than under utilized. School district managers usually use the argument that schools that are under utilized should be closed because they are no longer cost effective