The Burnsville-Eagan-Savage District school board, in the suburbs south of the Twin Cities, unanimously
approved
in April the plan for the sale and demolition of Metcalf Middle School, which closed in 2020, along with two local elementary schools.
A federal judge in Alabama granted Lawrence County permission to close R.A. Hubbard High School in Courtland. Because Hubbard is majority-black, and this closure will mean long bus rides to majority-white schools, the county needed federal approval for the closure under civil rights law. The bus rides aren’t the only cost to Courtland, though.
“Our community is going to take a hit when our Friday night lights football games aren’t there,” Mayor Riely Evans of North Courtland, Alabama, said. “It has been part of the pride of this community.”
It’s not brand new, but the wave of K-12 public school closures is crashing on shores previously untouched. In fact, it’s hitting almost everywhere: white and black; rural, suburban, and urban; north, south, east, and west. In New Milford, Connecticut, the old John Pettibone elementary school closed in 2015 due to low enrollment, and now seniors gather at the John Pettibone Community Center for “gentle adult yoga.”
Albuquerque, New Mexico’s public school enrollment has decreased from 85,000 to 73,000 over the past six years, the Associated Press
reported
. Los Angeles, Boston, and New York all report similar numbers. K-12 enrollment is down in all but four states, according to the
American Enterprise Institute’s Return to Learn Tracker.
The drop since 2020 is 5.9% in New York and 5.7% in Oregon.
The emptied-out public schools turned into community centers, or demolished for “low-density housing” as in Burnsville, will be defining images for the next couple of decades as demographic and cultural trends wash across the country.
The baby bust began in 2008 and thus is now 14 years old. There are fewer children in grades K-8 than there were 10 years ago, and that number will continue to fall for at least 10 years. Many other high schools over the next four years will follow R.A. Hubbard down the road of consolidation and closure. Colleges are already bracing for 2026 when the baby bust hits them, bringing at least a decade of contraction and probably more.
Those fewer school-age children are increasingly opting out of public schools. COVID-19 closures, masks, or other fun-sapping and learning-inhibiting measures convinced millions of parents to pull their children in favor of homeschooling or private school. The more remote and more masked the schools, the greater the drop in enrollment.
Plenty of other children simply fell through the cracks in 2020 and 2021 when school districts went “remote,” and some of those children never returned. The spasm of religious fervor over racial and transgender ideology has convinced more parents to jump ship.
It all adds up to empty classrooms and shuttered schoolhouses, which will stand as a monument to our decadence and fear.
