After years of putting off a decision to close schools, Austin district leaders are forming a plan that would consolidate campuses starting in August 2020.

It's too early to know which schools will be shuttered or even how the decisions will be made. But district leaders say postponing a decision is not an option as they predict a bleak financial forecast, exacerbated by a plummeting student population, ballooning annual recapture payments to the state, and depleting district reserves. The district must eliminate a $60 million shortfall by next school year.

Administrators on Monday will begin discussions with the school board on developing criteria for closing and consolidating campuses. Officials said they would later involve parents and a committee that has been studying the issue. According to a preliminary timeline, criteria and guiding principles would be set by April, administrators would present schools for possible consolidation by May and trustees would make decisions as early as June.

"We want to ensure every single scenario we produce puts a student in a better school environment. Period," said Matias Segura, district operations officer. "The methodology we develop and the principles we use to verify our outcomes will certainly reflect that."

The school district for at least the past quarter-century has been criticized for holding on to chronically underenrolled schools. State officials, consultants and district committees since at least 1993 have called out the district for inefficiencies, all recommending shuttering campuses.

But such discussions always have been met with public backlash, as parents and students defend neighborhood schools and East Austin community leaders warn against closing schools in a part of the city that for years dealt with the trauma of school closures as part of a desegregation plan that shuttered schools designated as black-only and kept open schools for whites.

The district’s financial strains aren’t new, though they’ve been worsening in recent years. District trustees repeatedly have said they will be forced in the coming months and years to make difficult choices, the cuts previous district leaders adamantly opposed, to solve the district's financial woes.

“We can’t afford to spend in the same way we have,” said board President Geronimo Rodriguez. “There is a political will to put all options on the table. There is a will to make the hard choices. We have to act.”

Calls to close

The district's enrollment has been declining for six consecutive years, but there have been calls to close low-enrolled schools ranging back a quarter century, when a Texas School Performance Review stated Austin facilities were underused and recommended the district close schools. Then in 2000, in a 736-page audit, the state comptroller again recommended consolidations. In 2009, financial consulting firm MGT of America, hired by the district, also recommended taking campuses offline. Within months, the district acted on more than half of the consultant's recommendations, but shuttering campuses was not among them.

And in 2011, a facilities committee tasked with finding inefficiencies recommended closing schools. About 1,500 people showed up to district meetings in one week to oppose the closures. And the school board shelved the recommendations.

In 2016, a new facilities and bond advisory committee worked alongside administrators for more than a year to create a facilities master plan, which was adopted in 2017, and also suggested schools should be closed. The consultant initially working on the plan identified schools for closure, but the committee's facilities report did not list specific campuses. Instead, it called on the school board to examine whether schools should be closed after three consecutive years of low enrollment. Trustees approved that plan, with safeguards to provide underenrolled schools resources and support to help boost enrollment before they would be considered for closure.

Most recently, an administrative plan to balance the budget listed 12 schools that could be closed to help narrow the gap. Then in January, a budget stabilization task force found that the district could save $1.2 million for each closure, pointing to 15 elementaries with fewer than 300 students, but did not name specific schools. The majority of the more than three dozen schools with enrollments under 75 percent of capacity are located east of Interstate 35. Some rank low by state testing measures and count high numbers of Latino and African-American students from low-income families.

District leaders, including some trustees and administrators, have said students who attend aging, underenrolled schools would be better off attending modernized or new campuses with strong academic programs and brimming with students.

Low enrollment won't be the only factor in identifying schools to close, Superintendent Paul Cruz said. Other criteria will include the physical condition of schools and their educational suitability, he said. Consultants three years ago performed complete facility and educational suitability assessments of every school. Several trustees also have said they want to consolidate schools in an equitable way, which could mean closing schools that are not under-enrolled west of Interstate 35.

"We have to look at developing a criteria that is equitable and considers multiple factors so that one or two communities aren't disproportionately impacted," Trustee Cindy Anderson said. "It is one tool to balance enrollment, but we need to examine feeder patterns and boundaries. It's going to take a number different strategies to balance out the district. No one thing is going to solve the issues. We don't want to create more problems with it."

Losing students

The 80,000-student Austin district has declined by more than 6,000 students since 2013, which equates to about $115 million in lost state funding.

School district administrators and demographers attribute the enrollment declines to a number of factors, including transfers to suburban districts and charter schools, and birth rates that declined with the 2008 recession. The number of school-age children living in some pockets of the district is falling, a phenomenon common among urban districts. Demographers describe the loss as a doughnut-shaped hole in the city, where the core has more schools with vacancies. Schools in other parts of the district continue to grow.

Despite a housing boom downtown and areas near downtown, few new homes built in those areas are designed for or marketed to families. At the same time, the new housing is driving up real estate prices, pricing out lower-income families.

The average market value of homes in the Austin school district last year was $441,067, much more than the average market values of homes in Del Valle ($184,059), Hays ($205,261), Pflugerville ($255,785), and Round Rock ($340,767) — four area districts that attract Austin families.

The enrollment decline comes even as the district has enacted countermeasures, including adding prekindergarten for 3-year-olds, starting tuition-based prekindergarten classes, launching a marketing campaign and opening doors to students who live outside the district boundaries. The district has picked up about 2,400 students by allowing transfers from other districts. District officials also have been working with underenrolled schools, allowing specialty programs, such as a dual language program at Becker Elementary in South Austin, a fine arts program at Blackshear Elementary in East Austin, and a dyslexia program at Covington Middle School in South Austin and providing money to market those programs.

Without those efforts, the declines could have been steeper, but critics say the district has not included surrounding communities for input or done enough to help the struggling schools.

Overcapacity, underenrolled

District officials over the years have discussed solutions to address the district’s overcrowded and half-empty schools. But talks about possible school closures and boundary changes have long been contentious in Austin.

Thirty-seven Austin district schools are at or below 75 percent capacity, the threshold the district considers when defining campuses as underenrolled. But nearly an equal amount, 38, enroll more than 100 percent of capacity. In some pockets of the district, particularly in Northwest and Southwest Austin, overcrowding is common, with schools beyond 150 percent capacity. Three elementary schools in those areas have more than 1,000 students, the size of the district’s larger middle schools.

But other campuses, primarily in East Austin, are half-empty, with one at 29 percent.

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Critics have said the district is pouring millions of dollars into repairs of old buildings, which diverts money away from academic goals. A January report by the Budget Stabilization Task Force also called on the district to shutter schools, but told trustees that cuts must not have “a disproportionately negative impact on certain parts of the district, namely East Austin.” Specifically, the report said closures cannot be limited exclusively to schools that are underenrolled, and recommended consolidations and any boundary changes should increase socio-economic and cultural diversity at schools and must be balanced east and west of Lamar Boulevard.

“All of the easy and non-controversial budget corrections have already been made, leaving only the special interest, sacred cows to be evaluated,” the task force report said. “Only the politically charged and difficult options to address the structural budget deficit remain.”

Attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project in 2014 warned Austin district officials against closing schools on the eastern side of the district. Other proponents of keeping schools open have said closures of underenrolled schools would have a disparate effect on already marginalized neighborhoods. One group of regular district activists have threatened to organize an independent district or to be absorbed into a neighboring one.

Ken Zarifis, the president of labor group Education Austin, and one of the task force members, said because the majority of the underenrolled schools are in the district's eastern side, he will not support any closures unless the district first redraws boundaries.

"We need to exhaust our options before looking at closing schools, but we haven't done that," Zarifis said.

Nationally, 1,573 schools, mostly elementary campuses, were closed in 2014-15, the most recent data available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Closures have been common among major urban school districts, with dozens shuttered in Chicago, and Washington, D.C. The Dallas district also has closed multiple campuses in recent years. Dallas school leaders last year proposed shuttering more, a plan that was met with resistance and prompted them to scale back to just a few.

Desegregation echoes?

Some experts warn there are repercussions to shuttering schools: Home values often decrease in the neighborhoods with closed schools; parents, particularly those in low-income neighborhoods, have more difficulty getting their children to the new campus locations, and building a sense of community and parental engagement becomes harder.

“Communities of color and low-income communities pay the burden of the closure but they’re not compensated for the burden," said Michelle Renée Valladares, associate director at the National Education Policy Center, a nonprofit policy research center in the school of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “There are a lot of ripple effects and unintended consequences when closing a school. The transitions have never been as smooth as promised so it has a tremendous disruption in the life of the kids. Building that sense of community and parental engagement becomes a lot harder.”

Some see in suggestions of focusing closures in East Austin an echo of the city's rocky history of desegregation.

As part of the desegregation efforts, the district in 1971 shuttered the original L.C. Anderson High School, which served as a place of pride for many in East Austin's African-American community.

Parent Emily Sawyer, whose children attend two underenrolled schools said district leaders must be "bold and undeterred by discomfort" in determining what equity should look like in the district as officials approach consolidations.

“Given the current realities in our city and district, school consolidations have become necessary and I believe inevitable,” Sawyer said. “It is not enough, however, to simply be fair minded and logical in choosing and applying criteria for school consolidations. We must choose to be radical in regressing the past racist wrongs perpetrated against those in the education system whom we historically did not see fit to educate."

Outside help



Some political heavy hitters, community and civic groups are making moves to support the district as it navigates school closures.

Austin Mayor Steve Adler and Council Member Kathie Tovo late last month raised the idea of transforming shuttered campuses into affordable housing or city parks.

Adler and Tovo in a joint statement said as the district faces possible closures, the city simultaneously faces a lack of affordable housing, places for parks and public facilities to meet community needs.

“Perhaps these two sets of challenges can add up to one good answer for our community: opportunities for some community needs to be met on all or part of repurposed AISD properties,” they said.

The city passed a resolution for the two entities to work together to use district facilities in a way to benefit the community.

The school district already has sold surplus land (though not schools) to developers and the city, stipulating that at least a portion of it be used to develop affordable housing, prioritizing district families and staff for such housing.

Leaders of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce also in January met with district officials, offering to support a strategic communications plan that explains to the public the need to make hard choices.

“You have a number of business leaders who care deeply about the community and want to help,” said Drew Scheberle, the chamber’s executive vice president of education. “We know that the school district has had some record academic performance and their financial status needs some shoring up and there are tough decisions they must make. We’re not trying to micromanage but trying to support those elected and those working to solve the problems.”