Baltimore City may close six neighborhood schools at the end of the current school year. Doing so might save a few dollars and allow spending on other schools to be more effective. But it could also devastate communities that are already fragile in terms of the education their schools provide for students.
The school board in Baltimore has proposed closing six neighborhood schools at the end of this school year, the Baltimore Sun reports:
- Abbottston Elementary School
- Langston Hughes Elementary School
- Dr. Rayner Browne Elementary/Middle School
- Northeast Middle School
- W.E.B. DuBois High School
- Heritage High School
They’ll vote on the proposal at their Dec 17 board meeting.
About closing the schools, the district’s family and community engagement planner, Nicole Price, said, “We want to make sure we are still delivering transformational educational opportunities to students … while looking at every cost-saving measure.”
Closing schools will save some money, I’m sure, as has been shown in other districts. For example, when 50 schools were closed in Chicago last year, the district projected it would save about $43 million annually in operating costs by not having to maintain those closed schools. But as WBEZ (NPR in Chicago) discovered, the district had not taken several additional operational expenses into account, including upgrades the district had to make at schools that would receive students from the closed schools.
If all goes according to plan, a total of 27 schools will be affected in Baltimore, including schools that will be receiving students from the closed schools. But a large number of people think having small schools, with small numbers of students in each classroom, is a good thing, not something that should result in the closing of a school.
“Small schools have a great value for little children,” the Sun quoted City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke, who opposes the closing of Abbottston, as saying. “Small schools are quiet and family-like and they can be intense in their teaching because students are at ease. They feel safe. Small schools are worth saving.” The school serves about 200 students and was renovated less than a decade ago. It also was one of the higher performing elementary schools in the city, in terms of scores on standardized tests, until a cheating scandal surfaced at the school.
In Chicago, the final report of the School Utilization Commission issued in March 2013, just three months before the largest school closure in US history, concluded that “many schools are well used, but technically under-utilized.”
Once again, non-educators willingly sacrifice quality in favor of quantity. We pick and choose which schools to invest our tax dollars in and which schools, where the kids are just as real and just as smart, to utterly abandon.
Careful scrutiny is called for in analyzing any projected savings from the closing of schools that are small and “technically” under-utilized. We have to ask, continually, Is it worth it?
The district has secured about $980 million in school construction funds, and using the money to upgrade and modernize fewer buildings might be prudent. However, closing schools degrades communities, and what I think is called for in this case is an equal investment in all the district’s schools.
A possible alternate strategy… One way to accomplish that could be to phase out the schools, rather than closing them all at once. Parents of students now at the schools could be given the choice of switching their children to the receiving schools, but no new students would be admitted to the schools slated for closure. That is, for middle schools, set the closure date two years from now.
If people choose, on their own, in time for district planning, to leave and the school would serve essentially no students, then my theory about taking things away from poor kids is completely wrong. On the other hand, the school would still close eventually; the closure just wouldn’t be depriving any kid of what he has grown accustomed to without his parent’s consent.
School buildings are anchors in many communities, especially in communities of poor, black families.
At Abbottston, more than 95 percent of students are Title I students, which indicates that their families have a low income relative to the number of children in the household. The same holds true at Rayner, Langston Hughes, and Northeast Middle.
At W.E.B. DuBois High School, about 82 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, also indicating a high incidence of poverty. At Heritage, the rate is close to 86 percent.
In other words, students at these schools are poor and will be adversely affected when they have to adjust to a new school building and environment. Take the poor kids and, without blinking an eye at a school board vote in the coldness of Maryland, take all they know about school away from them.
“This is not an intellectual issue,” Jitu Brown said. Mr Brown is the newest member of the board for the Network for Public Education, and he hates school closures. He first came to our attention in Chicago, as founder of a community organization that tried with all its might to stop the school closures there in 2013. It didn’t work.
Mr Brown made his plea at a panel discussion last month in New York, seated next to education historian Diane Ravitch.
And now it has come to Baltimore. By taking away everything these 10-year-olds ever knew about school, we are largely condemning the majority of them to a life not much better than the one they have now. As Mr Brown said, this isn’t an intellectual issue, where people line up on both sides of the aisle and discuss the $980 million with every degree of civility. No, it’s emotional, because closing small schools will shoot any growth Baltimore’s residents had hoped for in the foot.
And it’s a shame, because these kids are no better or worse than kids in the suburbs. Their families have less money, all right, but from an academic perspective, well, it just breaks my heart to see this happening all over the country.