Robbinsdale Area Schools could soon be the latest district to ask taxpayers to support a referendum.
Following a presentation from local teachers and parents, the school board was urged to act quickly to address declining enrollment and aging facilities.
"In the end, really, we never suggested a specific school to close, just that there are some changes needed," says group contributor Will Cardenas.
The group's other recommendations, like upgrades to school security and investments in new curriculum would likely require a bond referendum.
"The school district hasn't received a referendum in about 40-something years, so obviously any money that can go into education is, in my opinion, is well spent," says Cardenas.
He adds the purpose behind the report is to secure a sustainable future for students.
Group contributor Eric Pone says one approach could be for the district to have just one high school, instead of the two - Armstrong and Cooper - that are currently in the suburb.
"One of the things we talked about was that if we go to one high school, it cannot be named either Cooper or Armstrong," says Pone. "It cannot have either mascot, and one high school will bring all the divergent communities that make up District 281 together as one family."
Pone says the group evaluated schools anonymously and did not specify which ones should be closed.
This could lead the school board to consider a referendum in the next couple of months.
Enrollment issues nationwide forcing more schools to close
Nearly one in 12 public schools in the U.S. — or roughly 5,100 — experienced an enrollment decline of 20% or greater from 2019 to 2023, according to the report published last year by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education think tank. Most affected by this spike in enrollment declines were schools deemed by their states states as chronically low-performing, many of them in high poverty neighborhoods, the report found.
Public schools are expected to see enrollment fall 5.5% between 2022 and 2031 due largely to changing demographics, according to the National Center for Education Statistics projections.
As enrollment tumbled at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, districts closed around one-third fewer schools in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years than in the years prior, according to an analysis of 15 states by the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank.
Now that federal pandemic relief money has been used up, there is a backlog of underused schools that many districts won’t be able to afford to keep open, said Aaron Garth Smith, director of education reform at the Reason Foundation.
The trends are hitting districts with large shares of Black students, like St. Louis Public Schools, which is 78.2% African American, particularly hard.
The biggest increase in students leaving traditional public schools for other options, such as charter and online schools, has been in districts that serve mostly Black students, the Brookings Institute noted in a report released last month. Among those districts, the share of students in non traditional public schools rose from 25.4% in 2015-16 to 34.1% in 2023-24, the report found.
The example of Chicago shows how closures can impact students. The city closed 50 schools just over a decade ago in the largest school closure in U.S. history.
Fighting and bullying increased as displaced students settled into new schools, said Marisa de la Torre, managing director and senior research associate at the UChicago Consortium on School Research. Test scores dipped the year of the announcement for students in schools slated for closure. The displaced students’ reading scores eventually recovered, but gaps in math scores persisted four years afterward.