JEFFERSON PARISH, La. — The school year ended at Washington Elementary at 2:35 p.m. on a hot May afternoon, but one hour later, 9-year-old Malaysia Robertson lingered outside.
She had spent most of her life at this small public school in the New Orleans suburb where she lives with her grandmother. But when the new school year began this month, the school she knew so well had closed. Like thousands of other students in Louisiana’s largest school district, she has been shuffled to a new campus in a consolidation plan that affects nearly 1 in 10 of the district’s Black students, like Malaysia. It’s a disproportionate number.
On the last day of classes, she didn’t want to say goodbye.
“We were running down the hall, crying and everything,” Malaysia said later, remembering her final day of third grade. The parking lot remained filled with students, families and teachers well past 4 p.m., sharing hugs as they scattered from the campus for the last time.
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The school board’s decision this spring to permanently close six schools has rocked Jefferson Parish, where the number of students enrolled in public schools has dropped by nearly 10 percent since the pandemic began. The decline exacerbated the district’s nearly decade-long struggle to revive its enrollment after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, and district officials have said the closures are the necessary response to its shrinking student body. District data show that during the last school year, approximately 1 in 3 available student seats remained unfilled, and several buildings housed fewer than half the number of students they were initially built to hold.
“We have schools that are underutilized — that’s a fact,” said school board Vice President Derrick Shepherd at the April vote. “Math cannot be changed.”
The district has redrawn its map to redistribute students, requiring many to travel out of their neighborhoods and farther from home. Officials have said the new maps will make bus transportation more reliable, and no teachers will lose their jobs. But the decision angered community advocates and civil rights lawyers, who say the closures are not only harmful to families like Malaysia’s, but discriminatory too.
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Although White students make up nearly a quarter of the district’s enrollment, they represent only 12 percent of the students affected by the closures, according to state data. The plan the school board approved, which weighed which schools had the most empty space and inadequate facilities, closed two of its top-performing and majority-Black and -Hispanic high schools.
As a result, hundreds of Black and Hispanic students are being shuffled to lower-performing schools — an echo, to some families, of the district’s segregated and racist past.
“Who is going to benefit from this whole process? It’s not the Black and Brown children,” said Debra Houston Edwards, 77, who graduated from Washington over six decades ago and began working for the district in the 1980s, one of the few Black administrators at the time. “There is no equity in what is going on.”
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Shepherd and board President Ralph Brandt did not respond to requests for comment for this story. By email, the district’s communication director pointed to an online information page about the closures but did not respond to further questions.
The nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a civil rights complaint with the federal Education Department, alleging that the closures discriminate against students based on race and that the district failed to share information about the closures with families who speak limited English. A second complaint from the SPLC alleges that the closures are part of a trend of pervasive discrimination against some students based on race, as well as other attributes.
The department has not said whether it has opened an investigation into either complaint.
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In the meantime, experts say districts across the country may soon face a similar problem. More than 1 million students nationwide did not return to public schools after the pandemic. Some enrolled at private schools, others began home schooling, and still others seemingly disappeared, according to Thomas S. Dee, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. Amid declining birthrates, the Education Department estimates that national public school enrollment will drop by 5 percent or more by 2031 — a sharp change after decades of increasing enrollment.
“There’s going to be a reckoning for many school districts that haven’t acknowledged their new reality,” said Dee, who has studied the exodus from public schools. For many districts, he predicts, that will mean considering school closures.
That debate will not only be about whether and how to close schools, but also about which groups of students will bear the burden. Already, Black and Hispanic students have disproportionately taken the brunt, leaving researchers and advocates concerned that the nation’s declining public school enrollment — and the closures that will likely follow — will exacerbate inequities in public education.
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“The next 10 years is going to be full of these kinds of stories,” said Douglas N. Harris, chair of the economics department at Tulane University and director of the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. Through an analysis of nationwide school closures and restructuring trends over the past 30 years, Harris found that schools with a higher percentage of students of color were more likely to close than those with more White students, even when Harris and his co-researcher compared only schools with similar enrollment and performance levels.
Previous research from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes showed similar results, finding that among low-performing schools, those with a greater share of Black and Hispanic students are more likely to be closed than those with more White students, even if they ranked similarly.
To Malaysia’s aunt Cheryl Earl, the board’s decision has been devastating. Her older daughter, Ce’Vanne Ursin, transferred to Washington for fourth grade in 2022. She hated her previous school, she had told her mother, but at Washington, Ce’Vanne’s outlook completely shifted. By fifth grade, she had been selected for the school’s gifted and talented program. And at the end of the school year, she was named mistress of ceremonies for the final graduation, a coveted position.
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“I used to think I was dumb, but I’m really not,” said Ce’Vanne, now 12. “Washington made me feel comfortable. It made me feel like everyone in the school was my friends and family.”
Share this articleShareCe’Vanne said she felt lucky to be part of Washington’s final graduating class. But the closures meant her eight year-old sister wouldn’t have the same experience. Instead, the district reassigned her to the same school where Ce’Vanne had had bad experiences before Washington. Their mother said she is too scarred by Ce’Vanne’s time at that school to send her youngest back there. She enrolled both girls at a nearby Catholic school, and the district lost two more students.
When schools close, the ripple effects play out for years, according to Molly F. Gordon, previously a research scientist at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. Students’ academic performance often suffers, some families opt to leave as their neighborhoods become less desirable, and important histories are erased.
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After Chicago closed nearly 50 public schools in 2013 — widely considered the nation’s largest mass closure to date — Gordon and her team followed the outcomes of students who had been affected. Even before the closures, during the year they were announced, reading and math scores of affected students took a hit, putting them months behind students whose schools would remain open. Although the students’ reading scores eventually rebounded, the effect on their math scores persisted for four years.
“Students coming in from the closed schools felt like they lost something, because they did,” said Gordon, now a senior research scientist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. “They were grieving.”
Chicago’s closures were meant to save the district money and move students out of low-performing schools, where almost exclusively Black and Hispanic students were enrolled. Officials promised that the move would serve those students by placing them in better-performing schools. But, a decade later, students at schools that closed did no better academically than those at similar schools that stayed open, an investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times and local radio station WBEZ found. And though the move did cut costs, the savings were likely much lower than officials had originally estimated.
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The question that remains is one that Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, gets asked a lot: With resources stretched, enrollment numbers down, and closures on the table, what should districts do?
Roza says that closing schools should, in essence, benefit all students, freeing resources to spend on more staff and programming. But to ensure that’s the case, she said, districts must plan ahead and prioritize school performance, making sure relocated students are assigned to better-performing schools.
In Jefferson Parish, state performance data shows that hasn’t happened. Although elementary school students have been absorbed into higher-rated schools, the new plan closed the district’s second- and third-highest performing high schools. Many of those students now attend lower-rated schools — a kind of move “that just defies logic,” Roza said.
One that closed is Grace King High School, where Jefferson Parish resident Lillie Magee’s two grandsons completed 10th and 11th grade in May. The school was mostly made up of Hispanic and Black students, like Magee’s grandsons, and everyone seemed to get along, she said. She felt the boys were safe there; she knew their teachers and coaches, and had attended football games full of passion and pride. Now, many King students have been reassigned to their former rival school, and she feels she has lost a community she trusted to keep them safe.
“How they treated us, it’s just so unfair,” Magee said. The school her elder grandson will attend next year is ranked second-worst in the district by performance.
At Washington Elementary, the buildings sit dark and empty, the gates outside locked. The district plans to sell the site, allowing the future buyer to restore or raze the school.
Debra Houston Edwards, a former district administrator, hopes that at least the buildings — and the history they hold — will be saved. She knows the legacy well. In the 1930s, after the school board refused to open a high school for Black students in the area, Edwards’s grandfather and five other men collected funds, door to door, to buy the land and cover some of the construction costs. In 1936, it became the first school on the parish’s east bank of the Mississippi River where Black children could receive an education beyond the eighth grade.
“Nobody else had to do that but us,” Edwards said. “And so here we are again, going back through the same process.”
This month, Edwards and a group of community members offered to buy the school for $1, essentially requesting the school board donate the land — a site “for which our ancestors have already paid,” the group wrote in a letter to Brandt, the board president.
But Brandt said the board is “legally required to seek fair market value” on any property it intends to sell.
As for Malaysia and her grandmother Angie Robertson the new school year has brought difficult adjustments, to a new school, new classmates, and a community they have not been a part of before.
“But I did tell her, just stay there one year,” Robertson said. If Malaysia doesn’t feel comfortable by the end of fourth grade, Robertson said she would look into transferring her to private school.
If that happens, she’ll be yet another student lost from the district’s enrollment.
This story about the impact of school closures was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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