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SALT LAKE CITY — Four elementary schools in Salt Lake City will close at the end of the current school year, a decision largely driven by declining enrollment.
Prior to the Salt Lake City Board of Education's 4-3 vote on Tuesday night to close Hawthorne, M. Lynn Bennion, Mary W. Jackson and Riley elementary schools, Superintendent Elizabeth Grant remarked that national trends suggest Utah's capital city will likely revisit the issue in coming years.
Referencing a new Education Week article about the decline of school enrollment nationwide, Grant said schools from New York to California are shuttering schools.
"Boston is looking at closing half of its schools over the next years. Rochester, New York just closed 11 of 45 schools. San Antonio just closed 15 schools," she said.
Earlier this month, Boston city and school leaders unveiled a plan that contemplates closing half of its public schools due to declining enrollment, deteriorating infrastructure and inequitable student experiences.
The oldest school district in the country, Boston Public Schools' enrollment has dropped below 49,000 students, a 13% decline since 2006.
Utah school closures
Alpine School District, the state's largest school district, "just closed three schools and is looking at more. Granite District just closed one and closed three last year and they are looking at more next year," Grant said.
In 2019, the Ogden School District board voted to close Gramercy Elementary School.
Even as the Salt Lake City School District has yet to implement the school closures, shift boundaries and begin work on Grant's challenge that the remaining school communities establish "new schools" that welcome incoming students, there could be more closures to come.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Salt Lake's public school enrollment reflected the post-World War II baby boom, with head counts in some of those years that exceeded 40,000.
Now, the district's enrollment is less than half of that, which can be attributed to the declining birthrate, gentrification, and a growing number of private and charter school options that have depleted neighborhood school populations.
Salt Lake School District was also under pressure from state lawmakers who called for an audit of the school district's budget. One of the 2022 audit's recommendations was that the school board "should evaluate possible elementary schools for permanent closure."
'A very big decision'
The school district and respective school boards have discussed the school district's declining enrollment and the possibility of school closures since 2019, but the board took no action amid churn in the superintendency and the district's extended period of remote learning during the pandemic.
Salt Lake City School District leaders "will need to continue to look at school closure in our district. This will come up again. That said, it is a hard and consequential decision. It's a very big decision to make," she said.
Grant has personal experience with school closures. Earlier in her career, she served as principal at Lowell Elementary, which was also closed by vote of the school board some 20 years ago.
"At that time, I was dismayed, as many of the people are in the audience, by that decision. I thought it unwise," she said.
Rosslyn Heights, the elementary school Grant attended as a child, was shuttered two decades ago after a period of declining enrollment.
Grant said she's concluded that there is "no exceptionally fair way to decide among the schools" with respect to closure decisions.
Following the vote, Grant said the impact of this decision falls on select communities but "it affects the whole community and it is the responsibility of the whole community," starting with including her as the district's top administrator.
Grant called on district-level administrators, principals, educators and community members to help with the transition.
"I have said many times that this is our city. This is our district and these are all of our children," she said, adding, "Education is a community affair. It cannot be done by the district alone."
National birthrate decline
According to Education Week, enrollment projections dating back to 2012 foretold the impact of the nation's declining birthrate, with the most pronounced impacts in urban school districts.
The pace of recent enrollment declines are perhaps more surprising, with some urban school districts experiencing population changes hastened by the pandemic and families electing to home-school, enroll in private or charter schools, or move to suburban or rural communities.
"The rate of decline was probably thought to be addressable and manageable, and then the pandemic came around, and suddenly that rate really accelerated," David DeSchryver, senior vice president and co-director of research at Whiteboard Advisors, a communications, research, and consulting firm, told Education Week.
"Now what used to be something that could be addressed over time has a level of urgency to it that needs to be addressed now, and we expect that trend to grow," he said.
