At a February board meeting for Memphis-Shelby county schools in Tennessee, a parent of five children who currently or formerly attended Ida B Wells Academy, an alternative education school, asked board members a question.
“This is a high-performing school. This is not a school in crisis,” she said. “So I respectfully ask, why are we considering closing a school that is working?”
Indeed, while only 23% of students at the K-8 school tested at or above grade level in English language arts and 27% tested at or above grade level in math – which was below state averages – that was still better than the district’s Chickasaw middle school, where only 7% of students tested at or above grade level in English and less than 5% did so in math, according to state data.
But the district was still considering closing both those two schools – and three others too – in large part because student enrollment had plummeted, which meant the district was not using parts of old buildings that required significant maintenance.
The district is one among many in the United States that have closed schools and are considering closing more. One of the primary reasons is that many adults in the US are simply not having kids, or having fewer of them. And an increasing number of those who do are instead sending their kids to private schools or homeschooling them.
That trend, experts say, means that more US schools are becoming underenrolled, which places school districts in a difficult financial situation because that decline in students means they get less public funding. They must then decide between uprooting students from familiar surroundings and friends or keeping those institutions open even if it doesn’t make fiscal sense.
“I’m seeing many districts shirk from closing underenrolled schools, and one of the things I like to stress to people is, if one doesn’t do that, there are no free lunches. There are some trade-offs that are going to have to occur,” said Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor.
The US birthrate has declined dramatically in recent decades. In 1960, there was an average of 3.7 births per woman; in 2024, the number was 1.6, according to the World Bank Group.
“There’s a lot about the trend that’s positive, so, for example, in America, teenage pregnancy is way down,” and “we know that young people have a better chance of achieving upward mobility for themselves and their children if they wait to start a family [until] after they have gotten a foothold in the labor market and gotten married”, said Michael J Petrilli, president of the Thomas B Fordham Institute, a conservative education thinktank. Also, “people have more choices today than they did in the past … so you see more people choosing to not get married or not have kids”.
While districts had planned for fewer students in the coming years, the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated virtual learning accelerated that downturn, Dee said. In fall of 2020, enrollment in US public schools decreased by 1.1 million, according to a study co-authored by Dee.
“Many families understandably didn’t want to put a very young child in front of a laptop or a computer all day and found other options,” like private schools or homeschooling, Dee said. “I thought that was something that would revert back, as US schools returned to in-person instruction in the fall of 2021, and that just hasn’t happened.”
That meant some schools were suddenly much emptier.
“There are some high fixed costs to just running a school building. Regardless of how many students are there, it still has to be lit and clean. So that has put many school districts in a financial bind,” Dee said.
To cut costs, schools will sometimes eliminate arts and music electives, advanced courses and academic intervention programs, such as tutoring, said Tara Moon, a policy analyst at FutureEd, a thinktank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
The next step is often staffing cuts, Moon said.
“If too few students sign up for a course, it isn’t economically viable to run it,” Moon said. “Even if student demand exists, enrollment-driven budget shortfalls can force staffing cuts, meaning the teacher who taught that [advanced placement] course is let go or redeployed to cover higher-need subjects.”
In recent months, the Houston independent school district approved a closure of 12 schools; Florida’s Broward county public schools approved a consolidation of six schools; Cleveland metropolitan school district approved a closure of 29 schools; and Atlanta public schools decided to close or repurpose 16 schools, according to K-12 Dive.
In Memphis, the school board met in February to consider closing five schools and could shutter 15 over the next three years, Chalkbeat reports.
The city’s fertility rate decreased from 74 births per 1,000 women in 2007 to 62.5 births in 2023. Between 2023 and 2024, Shelby county, which includes Memphis, also saw the largest population decrease in the United States, according to the Tennessee State Data Center.
The school district lost more than 10,000 students in its traditional and charter schools between 2014 and 2024, according to Chalkbeat. Meanwhile, the district faces $1.6bn in deferred maintenance costs for its buildings over the next decade.
Despite those numbers, some people still opposed the closures, including of Ida B Wells, which was named after the Memphis civil rights activist and teacher.
The school’s enrollment decreased from 171 students in 2018 to 99 in 2025, according to the state.
The district needed to close schools like Ida B Wells, which opened in 1963, because “we have got to get these students into better buildings where we can do some renovations and provide more state-of-the-art equipment,” said Natalie McKinney, school board chair.
The board ultimately approved the closure of the five schools at the end of this school year.
McKinney said she recognized that community members care about these places and suggested that the district could bring artifacts from them into the new buildings.
“You have the children there and their mothers and grandmothers and their great-grandmothers might have attended that school … so there is a lot of love and attachment,” said McKinney. “I said to people that this is about what we have got now and what we want to see for our students now, and I’m sure you would much rather that they are getting the best and highest-quality education in the best and highest-quality facility.”
