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Minutes before first bell, Penny Núñez-Brandão scanned the crowd outside Glen Cove Elementary School, looking for familiar faces.
“I don’t see any,” the fifth grader told her mom one morning this August. “None of my friends are coming.”
The start of a new school year can be nerve-racking under any circumstances. But for Penny and thousands of students across the U.S., this academic year brought the added difficulty of adjusting to an entirely new school after their previous one shuttered. As U.S. birth rates continue a multi-decade slide and state and federal education funding dries up, an increasing number of cash-strapped school districts around the country have resorted to closing campuses to save money.
A total of 1,156 schools closed during the last academic year — the highest number since the pandemic, according to an analysis of federal data by Big Local News at Stanford University. At the same time, new research shows student enrollment has fallen much faster than schools are closing — suggesting more painful financial choices lie ahead.
The Vallejo City Unified School District, a working-class district near San Francisco, serves half as many students as it did two decades earlier. District leaders have closed five campuses since 2025 – a quarter of its schools. They’ve also placed up to a third of all staff positions on the chopping block to help plug a staggering $36 million deficit.
Still, research shows closing schools rarely yields the financial relief districts hope for.
Busing students to their reassigned schools, severance for pink-slipped staff and security for empty facilities often eat up any savings. School closures can also set students back academically and make it harder to attract teachers, who may worry the jobs aren’t stable.
Closing schools can also trigger a new downward spiral, as frustrated families flee to charter or private schools or other districts. In Vallejo, some parents said they chose to homeschool this fall or were planning to sell their homes and move to neighboring districts.
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