Desperate families flee hometowns as shuttered schools leave students packed in crowded classrooms

Thousands of American students began this academic year at unfamiliar schools after their campuses were shut down.

Starting a new school year can be nerve-wracking under any circumstances, but for these pupils, it came with the added challenge of adjusting to an entirely new school after their previous ones closed.

An increasing number of cash-strapped school districts around the country have resorted to closing campuses to save money, as U.S. birth rates continue a multidecade slide and state and federal education funding dries up.

New research shows student enrollment has fallen much faster than schools are closing, suggesting more painful financial choices lie ahead. The Associated Press is covering school closures in partnership with The Hechinger Report and Big Local News at Stanford University. These are some takeaways from their reporting.

A total of 1,156 U.S. 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. 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 the district’s 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. In Vallejo, a city still struggling to bounce back from the closure of a naval base in the 1990s, school enrollment has tumbled from nearly 18,000 in the fall of 2006 to about 9,300, the district says.

School districts nationwide, including large systems in Cleveland, Houston and Philadelphia, are facing similar closures. The enrollment and financial situation is unlikely to improve, said Lydia Rainey, research principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

“States aren’t about to open the coffers and swoop in with additional funds to save schools,” she said. Nationwide, public school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students, roughly 3%, between fall 2019 and 2024, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal education data collected by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee and sociologist Jaymes Pyne.

The total number of schools has declined, too, but only to about pre-pandemic levels, the researchers found, suggesting closures are lagging behind enrollment declines. Lower birth rates are the primary reason for enrollment decline, but a federal crackdown on immigration and the post-pandemic expansion of private school vouchers and homeschool options have contributed.

Bellwether and WestEd, two research groups, recently estimated declining enrollment could cause schools to lose $11.5 billion in state revenue annually by 2030-2031, potentially prompting widespread layoffs, cuts to academic programs and school closures. 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 trigger a downward spiral, too, 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. “Families are literally packing up their kids and moving away,” said Vallejo mom Kimberly Núñez-Brandão, whose daughter’s elementary school closed.

She recently attended curriculum night for her daughter’s new school, Glen Cove Elementary, and shared her shock at learning Penny’s new fifth-grade teacher had 32 students in his first class. “They already overwhelmed teachers with 30-plus students,” she said.

“Who’s winning here?” Rubén Aurelio, superintendent for Vallejo schools, acknowledged cuts and closures can be hard for families but said they are necessary to correct for school districts and budgets designed for a different reality.

“We’re not just closing schools to close schools,” Aurelio said. “We’re right-sizing a district that was built for significantly more kids. And if we’re going to actually improve outcomes for the kids we still have, we need to concentrate resources.”

The already painful cost-cutting measure may push even more families into competing charter networks, neighboring districts or private alternatives, further eroding the funding schools get per enrolled student. So along with cutting budgets, Vallejo is renovating older campuses, hoping to draw younger parents who can’t afford to start a family in San Francisco.

The superintendent said he also plans to open a Tagalog-language school soon, targeting Filipino families from across the Bay Area. Marisa de la Torre, a managing director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, said instability created by school closures may last for a while. Studies from the University of Chicago show that academically, displaced students often suffer long-term drops in reading and math.

That’s especially true when students end up at low-performing schools. “It takes a while to recover, if they recover at all,” she said. Núñez-Brandão isn’t sure she wants to stick around long enough to find out. Weeks into the new school year, Penny still struggled to adjust to Glen Cove.

She started to make new friends and said she feels comfortable on campus. She also liked her teacher, a first-year educator who’d joined Vallejo’s teacher residency program, launched last year to attract new educators and improve retention. But with 32 kids in the class, she said it’s hard to concentrate.

On a Tuesday in October, Núñez-Brandão received a note in the Glen Cove parent portal: Penny’s teacher resigned, effective immediately. The school will rely on a long-term substitute for now, the district said. The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations.