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Dozens of North Texas families gathered at school board meetings last night to beg district officials not to shutter the schools at the hearts of their communities. Whether their pleas will be successful will be decided in the coming weeks, when the Coppell ISD and Grapevine-Colleyville ISD school boards finalize a vote on shutting down schools due to low enrollment and economic strains.
Coppell ISD plans to close Town Center Elementary School, a decision that the district says could save $1.3 million, and move the New Tech High School onto the Coppell High School campus. In Grapevine-Colleyville, district officials are still determining which schools and how many schools will be closed, but Dove, Colleyville, Bear Creek, Bransford and Glen Hope Elementaries have all been put on notice by the district. The district is looking to find $3 million in savings.
“I find it gut-wrenching that just days ago, our teachers were told by upper admin that they could not guarantee their jobs,” said Lauren Torti, a teacher at Town Center Elementary.
The discussion to close a Coppell ISD elementary school comes less than a year after the school board approved the closure of Pinkerton Elementary. The closure inspired a similar wave of outrage from parents, neighbors and educators to the one trustees are grappling with now. It’s a position district leaders across the country have found themselves in after failing to realize that spacing out closures doesn’t lessen the emotional blow.
Carrie Hahnel, a senior associate partner at education research nonprofit Bellwether, has studied the increase in school closures that have haunted districts across the U.S. in the last two years, and said superintendents and board members often regret taking the “a few at a time” approach to school closures because of how “politically difficult” the decision can be.
“Approaching the whole thing as a package of solutions often makes more sense than doing it piecemeal, but unfortunately, a lot of times what we see happen is … they’ll propose a slate of closures, they’ll get public resistance, they’ll pull a few of the schools off the list,” Hahnel said. “They’ll end up voting to maybe close one or two (schools), or maybe do some consolidations here and there. And then before you know it, two, three years later, they’re back doing the same thing.”
A recent study published by Bellwether found that the “era of rare school closures may be coming to an end” due to declining enrollment numbers stemming from a declining birth rate, economic stressors, migration trends and more families choosing to opt out of the traditional education system. According to Bellwether’s data, Coppell ISD saw a modest increase in enrollment between school year 2019-2020 and school year 2023-2024, but Grapevine-Colleyville ISD’s enrollment fell 4.7%.
In Monday night’s board meeting, a district official said demographers had believed 200 more students would enroll in the district than ended up in classrooms this fall, and moving forward, Texas’ school voucher program adds another layer of uncertainty to enrollment projections.
All of these factors were brewing before COVID-19, Hahnel said, but the return to the classroom since the pandemic has thrown fuel on those flames. Furthermore, federal dollars that were poured into schools during the pandemic could have helped districts staring down the barrel of school closures to put off that decision, which is why it now feels like the hammer is dropping everywhere, at districts of nearly every size and shape.
“I’ve spoken to some rural districts who have been experiencing enrollment decline for a decade or longer. (School closures are) not as surprising to them, but I think now we’re seeing it more widespread. It’s not just the rural districts. It’s kind of everywhere,” said Christine Dickason, a senior policy analyst with Bellwether who co-authored the school closure report. “So I think we’re going to feel that more. More folks are going to feel it hitting home.”
Some parents were reduced to tears on Monday night while advocating for their child’s school to stay open. Others accused their respective district of an “intentional … lack of transparency” in determining which schools should close.
“You all see Dove (Elementary) as data in a slide deck,” Kristin Peters told the Grapevine-Colleyville ISD school board.
In Texas, district funding from the state has failed to keep up with inflation, and the state’s strategy to pay schools for every student present has left districts feeling penalized twice for enrollment dips. Citing budget woes, Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD, Coppell ISD, Fort Worth ISD, Richardson ISD, Irving ISD, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, Plano ISD and Lewisville ISD have all discussed or approved school closures in the last year.
But in some regions, especially in the enclaves Texas cities are known for, high property values have helped school districts completely avoid the closures affecting their neighboring school systems.
Highland Park ISD in Dallas, for instance, has not engaged in conversations about school closures despite seeing similar enrollment declines to other North Texas districts. Last year, Highland Park ISD Superintendent Mike Rockwood announced in an email to parents that, between 2017 and 2024, 641 fewer students had enrolled in the district. An additional 450-student deficit is anticipated by 2029. The district has announced staffing changes to accommodate the declining enrollment.
Still, Rockwood assured parents that no elementary school programs would be cut. That’s more than many other districts have been able to tell their parents.
“It’s something that people are starting to notice and it’s generating a lot of conversation in communities because it seems just really unfair that people are experiencing the same demographic patterns differently,” Hahnel said.
For now, most of the school closures affecting North Texas have been elementary schools. In an appeal to parents, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD officials said Monday that the number of empty seats in the schools being considered for closure could fill two elementary schools; running utilities, staffing and programming for half-filled schools is costing districts money they can’t spare, trustees said.
Still, this problem will age. In a few years, those empty seats and smaller class sizes will filter into middle schools, and then high schools a few years after that. North Texas districts may be feeling the school closure pain now, but it isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.
“I have yet to see an example of a district that has delayed school closures that’s been able to find budget solutions that help prevent school closures in the future,” Hahnel said. “The reality is that school board members, although they have fiduciary responsibilities, they also want to represent their communities. And so it’s very difficult for them to vote to close the school because they’re being pulled in two directions. I’d say that’s often why we see districts try other things first.”
