The El Paso Independent School District is planning to close or consolidate schools — which the district calls “sunsetting campuses” — by the 2025-26 school year as it braces for continued declining enrollment.

EPISD Superintendent Diana Sayavedra on Wednesday announced the district is evaluating programs, resources and facilities and will present recommendations to the Board of Trustees in late fall.

The district will hold a series of this month to introduce their restructuring plans and gather public input.

In an interview with El Paso Matters, said the district still doesn’t know how many or which of its 76 campuses could be affected but noted it does not plan to close any high schools at this point.

“If we don’t begin to have that conversation and make those difficult decisions, we will find ourselves in a crisis,” Sayavedra told El Paso Matters. “So before we get there, we’re giving ourselves a good runway to partner with the community so that our decisions are informed.”

EPISD enrollment declines

The superintendent of El Paso’s largest school district said the change is needed due to declining enrollment that she expects to continue falling in the coming years.

EPISD’s enrollment has declined by 20% since the 2013-14 school year, according to the Texas Education Agency. The district currently has fewer than 50,000 students for the first time since the 1960s.

“Over the next 10 years, we stand to lose additional students. Because our birth rates and the birth rates nationally are showing that we’re graduating more students from school systems than there are children being born,” Sayavedra said.

The number of children born to El Paso County residents declined by 21% between 2013 and 2023, according to state data provided to El Paso Matters. Nationally, the number of births declined by 9% in the same period.

Elementary schools are the first affected by declining birth rates. nine elementary schools between the 2018-19 and 2020-21 school years. The declines then ripple through to middle schools and high schools over the years.

Sayavedra said she expects the district’s enrollment to settle between 36,000 and 42,000 students. That would take the district’s enrollment back to where it was in the 1950s, according to newspaper reports from that period.

El Paso ISD budget, teacher pay

As enrollment declines, Sayavedra said the district will likely have to tighten its budget and possibly forego raises for its teachers and other employees in the coming school year.

“I don’t foresee that we can give a significant compensation increase, if any at all. But what I can share with you is that I’m going to bring a balanced budget to the board,” Sayavedra said. “We’re not at a point where we’re having to make significant staffing cuts because we’ve been very conservative and very fruitful and very strategic about our budget development process.”

She said the district plans to maintain its fund balance at 75 days or higher and keeps its employee’s insurance premiums the same.

Trustees for El Paso’s two other largest school districts, the and Ysleta Independent School Districts, have also said they may not be able to give employees raises in the 2024-25 school year.

During an April board meeting, SISD trustees discussed possibly reducing its employee health plan contributions as it deals with a $33 million deficit.

The future of EPISD high schools

Though Sayavedra said EPISD does not currently plan to close any high schools in the district, many have also seen declines in enrollment.

Since the 2013-14 school year, enrollment dropped by over 43% at Irvin High School, 27% at Austin High School, and 21% at Andress High School.

Among EPISD’s 10 traditional high schools, El Paso and Franklin were the only ones to see their enrollment increase during that time, by 31% and under 9%, respectively.

2025 bond election plans

The district also plans to bring a bond election to voters in November 2025 to upgrade heating and cooling systems throughout the district, improve security and potentially pay for upgrades or the construction of new consolidated school campuses.

Sayavedra said changes would need to be made even without a bond.

“If we were to sunset a campus, and families are going to transition to another campus, with a bond there may be opportunities for us to update that facility so that it’s a healthier learning environment for children. But if we’re not able to pass a bond, at the very least what we will be able to offer is program expansion for the receiving campus,” Sayavedra said.

What’s next in school closure plan?

A series of will be held this month to gather input from the community. Over the summer, the district will develop preliminary criteria for school consolidations and closures.

The criteria will be shared with the community by early fall, and the district will conduct a preliminary analysis of campuses, including which schools require facility improvements or have opportunities to implement or expand programs.

Recommendations will be presented in late fall to the EPISD school board, which will vote on which schools to close or consolidate.

Timeline:

May 2024: 10 feeder pattern community meetings

Summer 2024: EPISD reviews feedback; begins developing preliminary criteria for school consolidations, closures

Early fall 2024: Criteria shared with the community; begins preliminary analysis of campuses, including which schools require facility improvements or have opportunities to implement or expand programs; more community meetings

Late fall 2024: EPISD presents recommendations to the Board of Trustees.

2025-26 school year: School consolidations, closures implemented

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The San Antonio and Plano school districts announced this week that they will look into closing campuses, citing population declines among children and competition from charters.

The urban and suburban districts are different in size and demographics, but neither has been immune to the troubles affecting other school districts across the state, including rising costs and declining student enrollment.

The San Antonio Independent School District, home to almost 50,000 students, announced Monday that they would recommend 19 schools to close. Seventeen would close within the 2023-2024 school year. The move would save the school district from a $300 million budget shortfall in the near future, officials said.

Superintendent Jaime Aquino said enrollment losses, lack of affordable housing, a declining birthrate and not having gradually closed campuses earlier led the district to recommend the closures. Since 1998, the district has lost over 18,000 students.

“The [school] board was concerned that the result of these trends was a growing and unintended inequitable distribution of student-driven resources, not just [of] revenue but of money and spaces,” Aquino said.

Teri Castillo, a San Antonio City Council member, said five of the campuses slated to close are in her district and that the process is moving too fast.

“If equity is an integral part of this process, it is difficult to find its role in this preliminary list of school closures,” Castillo said. “A majority of which are in historically underserved parts of our city, particularly in the West, East, and South sides of San Antonio.”

Then on Tuesday, the Plano Independent School District announced that it would look into forming a committee that would evaluate enrollment trends, facility assessments and demographic data before deciding whether closures are needed.

Plano, long seen as a booming suburb with great schools, has seen a decline in the last decade in the number of children under the age of 18 and in the average family size, according to U.S. Census data. The district, which had about 55,000 students about a decade ago, has lost nearly 10,000 since then.

The pandemic had a direct impact on enrollment and, perhaps more significantly, , a crucial metric that helps determine how much money school districts get from the state. In Texas, if a student misses school, their district’s attendance average goes down and so does the amount of money it receives. And in a post-COVID-19 world in which parents are quicker to keep their children home if they’re feeling ill, some districts’ finances have become more volatile than ever.

Lawmakers haven’t made it easier for school districts. They this year’s regular legislative session without allocating any new funding after failing to reach an agreement on whether to create a school voucher program in the state. Gov. has said he back for a special session on education in October to resolve these issues, but for some districts, it may be too late.

Financial shortfalls have led school districts across the state to adopt, meaning their expenditures outweigh their revenues. Some schools have dipped into their savings to offer teachers minimal raises, balance their budgets or simply keep

Closing schools to save money isn’t a new strategy but Texas has been seeing more schools go this route, or at least consider it. Last year, the Pflugerville Independent School District officials also closing down schools to save money in the face of declining enrollment. Eventually, the district decided schools after seeking community input.

For administrators in Pflugerville, the blame for the shortfall fell on the state’s funding system. Texas schools get a base amount of money based on student attendance but school districts believe a more accurate metric — and one that would bring them more money — would be basing school funding on average enrollment.

With lawmakers gearing to tackle public education issues again in a few weeks, there is a chance that school districts might receive an influx of cash soon. It’s unclear whether changes to the funding system would help Plano and San Antonio ISDs prevent school closures.

During the regular session, the only bill that would have provided school districts with more money and slightly changed the funding formula to better reflect enrollment died after Senate Republicans tried to add a school voucher program to it. House lawmakers didn’t advance the proposal.

Now the question is whether lingering bitterness between the House and the Senate following Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial and acquittal will further sour any hope of good-faith negotiations between the chambers over school vouchers and funding.

“We need to start off with the reality that school choice was already rejected multiple times by the Texas House,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University. “Now, any desire that the House might have had to work with the Senate and the governor was obliterated on Saturday with the acquittal of Attorney General Paxton.”

Monty Exter, director of governmental relations at the Association of Texas Professional Educators, said school closures are complicated and very unpopular, but certain demographic shifts, such as fewer children being born and housing costs rising, leaves school districts with no choice.

On top of that, lawmakers failed to increase funding proportionate to the rise of inflation, creating more financial issues for schools.

“Districts are in a really hard spot with these decisions,” he said. “At the same time, it is to some extent, beyond the district’s ability to control these situations.”

Disclosure: Association of Texas Professional Educators and Rice University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

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After more than a century, the end came swiftly for Hallsville Elementary School.

The smallest school in Manchester, New Hampshire, enrolling around 260 children from kindergarten to fifth grade, is also the oldest continually operating facility in the school district. First opened in 1891, it now requires millions of dollars in renovations and, like several schools across the city, is under-enrolled. In December, a consulting group studying Manchester’s school capacity and utilization recommended shuttering four elementary schools as a way of cutting costs and operating more efficiently. A few months later, the local board approved just one for closure: Hallsville.

“It was a proposal in the middle of the school year, and then, next thing you know, it was happening,” said Tina Krajewski, who has sent two children to Hallsville. “Looking back at it, it’s just insane to know that it’s going to be gone. It breaks my heart.”

Long before the emergence of COVID-19, schools around the United States were experiencing an erosion in their enrollment numbers. Our nationwide K-12 enrollment, roughly 55 million kids, remains one of the largest in the world. But birth rates have slipped ever since the Great Recession, first abruptly, then persistently. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on population growth in May, few experts were surprised to see that total births had fallen to their lowest number since 1979. Over 700,000 in 2020 than in 2007, the year the financial crisis began, even though there are now significantly more women in their child-bearing years.

Fertility rates , from the comparative peaks in the Dakotas to . New Hampshire, with 48.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44, ranks above only its Green Mountain neighbor in general fertility. If not for the impressive influx of migrants from other states, by its natural beauty and high quality of life, New Hampshire’s population shrinking. And fewer children means fewer students; Manchester, the state’s economic capital and largest school district by far, has lost more than one-fifth of its enrollment over the last decade.

With no rebound in sight — the pandemic has clearly suppressed family formation — what’s already happened there may well be coming to a school near you.

The nationwide slowdown in natural population growth isn’t limited to a few regions or segments of society. Though researchers have of births decreasing among younger women and rising somewhat for their older counterparts, fertility sank this year for all age ranges between 15 and 44 (including record lows for those between ages 20 and 29). Women in all racial and ethnic categories are having fewer children, but recent years have brought for Hispanic women, who previously made up for much of the collapse among other groups. And while states with the very lowest growth are clustered largely in the West and Northeast, the “birth dearth” has now spread to every area of the country.

In New England, the nation’s hardest-hit region, local leaders increasingly feel the need to respond. The adjustment is leading Manchester to consider moves that will go much further than closing a single elementary school. At a special school board meeting last month, Superintendent John Goldhardt unveiled a plan the district’s three traditional high schools into one new building. Originally hired two years ago from Utah, one of the fastest-growing parts of the country, Goldhardt said in an interview that the city’s shifting demographics meant that urgent action was required.

“We are becoming grayer,” he said. “I’m new to the state, but a lot of our high school and college graduates don’t stay, so the population as a whole is older. I’m not sure what is causing that, but I know that birth rates and family sizes are way down.”

Krajewski said she was waiting to hear more about the consolidation plan, and that she understands the challenge of maintaining aging facilities with fewer students. But that doesn’t take the sting out of losing a school where her father was a student decades ago, and where her niece now attends as a fifth-grader. As the academic year winds down, she is busy assembling the building’s 130 years of institutional memory into one last yearbook.

“It’s really emotional for me because this is the final yearbook that Hallsville will ever have,” she said. “And I’m grateful to be the one to help put it together for the students, but at the same time, it’s like, ‘This is gone.”

The Great Recession’s long hangover

The United States has historically been a kind of demographic unicorn, enjoying both world-leading levels of education and economic development while also posting year after year of comparatively high population growth. Even as international competitors like Europe and Japan had to cope with ever-worsening ratios of retirees to prime-age workers, America’s big families and relatively welcoming posture toward immigration made us the exception.

The long hangover of the Great Recession changed all that. Policymakers initially saw the drop in births beginning in 2008 as typical of a contractionary economy and likely to recover once catastrophic joblessness and uncertainty dissipated. But even a decade later, as the pre-pandemic labor market neared full employment, fertility continued to dwindle. All told, according to the calculations of demographer Kenneth Johnson, have been born over the last 13 years than would have arrived if 2007-era birth rates had continued.

Johnson, a professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy, said that the question in recent years has been whether those missing births were either delayed — by younger women who decided to start families later in life — or foregone entirely. Even before the pandemic, he noticed that fertility among older women, while steady, was not compensating for the lower numbers earlier in the decade; in its wake, he added, even fewer births are likely to follow.

“If you think about it, the women who delayed their births in their early 20s, who are now in their early 30s, may well have been planning to have babies about now,” Johnson said. “But the latest data I’ve seen [suggests] that one-third of women were planning to delay births because of COVID. If that’s the case, we’ve got another delay on top of the ones we’ve already seen.”

New Hampshire is a case in point: This year, it was that saw more deaths than births (13,511 vs. 11,773). That might not come as a total surprise in a year when COVID killed hundreds of thousands, but in New Hampshire, the trend actually dates back to 2017. The , most apparent in the rural precincts near the Canadian border, is also felt downstate, where transplants from Massachusetts and other New England states have often fled in search of more favorable tax rates.

Formerly an industrial capital that housed in the world, Manchester is as a “Silicon Millyard.” Its 112,000 residents make up the largest urban center in northern New England, but between 2007 and 2017, over 14 percent, from 1,664 to 1,423. At the same time, home prices throughout New Hampshire the pandemic-era run on real estate, in large measure due to more retirees choosing to “age in place,” which prevents housing supply from turning over.

Krajewski, whose parents each came from families of nine or more children, argued that the climbing cost of childcare and prevalence of one-parent households have led more young people to have fewer children, or even abstain from parenthood altogether.

“It’s a very different dynamic than what it used to be when my dad went to elementary school, where the classes were bigger and there were more kids in general,” she said. “It’s not like that now. A lot of my friends only have one or two children; some of my friends don’t have any children and don’t want children.”

Peter Lubelczyk is the principal of Jewett Street Elementary School, which will be of students displaced from Hallsville this fall. A former Jewett student himself, he pointed to the lack of young families as a key explanation for Manchester’s enrollment shortfalls.

“The neighborhood where I grew up, 50 or 60 percent of the neighbors are still there who were there when I was a kid,” Lubelczyk said. “My mother is still living in the house I was raised in, where she’s been for 50 years. I think there are a lot of families who stay in their homes for a long time because it’s their forever home. That older population in Manchester will definitely result in declining school populations.”

Families ‘feeling the crunch’

It would be one thing if decreasing birth cohorts simply meant smaller class sizes. But it’s not that simple: Every student lost to districts like Manchester also translates into fewer education dollars sent from legislators in Concord.

A major outlier in the northeast, New Hampshire has always been characterized by skepticism toward government. With no state taxes on wages or sales, it raises less revenue than its neighbors and ranks for per-pupil education aid dispensed by the state. According to from the New England Public Policy Center (a think tank affiliated with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston), an average of 47 percent of K-12 education revenue in the 2015-16 school year came from state governments. In Vermont, the figure was much higher, 89 percent. In New Hampshire, just 33 percent of funding came from the state, with 61 percent coming from local taxpayers.

Bruce Mallory, a professor emeritus of education at UNH’s Carsey School and observer of New Hampshire schools for decades, has recently worked with studying education finance in the state. He said that the intense reliance on local revenues can make communities particularly sensitive to fluctuations in population size.

“A new housing development goes up in a small community, 50 new kids, and that puts huge strains on the school budget,” Mallory observed. “The reverse of that is, school populations decline, taxpayers ask, ‘How come our local education costs are staying flat or going up when the enrollment is down? We’re not going to pay for that!’’

In an attempt to gain relief, Manchester voters on both property tax revenues and expenditures in 2009. That restriction can be overridden, and periodically has been to secure more money for schools. But between the smaller pot of funding and the relatively higher needs of local students — the district enrolls far more English learners and low-income pupils than is typical in New Hampshire, one of the highest-income states in the country — budgets are stretched thin. One , commissioned last year from the American Institutes for Research by the state panel studying education finance, estimated that Manchester schools were underfunded by “almost $10,000 per student.”

Nicole Leapley was elected to the local school board in 2019. This May, petitioning for reforms to the state’s funding policies, and in an interview, described the status quo as “anti-young-people.”

“The whole playing field is set up in a way that really doesn’t support families,” she said. “If our population is growing, it’s mostly people saying, ‘Oh, I’d like to retire to the seacoast.’ But I think families are feeling the crunch and probably are being driven away.”

One of the most significant signs of strain is the state of the district’s building stock. According to the capacity review released last year, Manchester schools currently face $158 million in deferred maintenance and capital improvement costs — the result of buildings like Hallsville, which have been in use long after their typical lifecycle was spent. Superintendent Goldhardt said that the price tag for renovation could be much greater than the cost of building new schools.

“Some may say, ‘I’m okay with this old, shabby building that we’re paying a lot of money for, and that we’re going to have to pour millions into,’” he said. “But eventually, it’s like the old car: You can only replace the radiator so many times before the bottom falls out, and you can’t drive it anymore because the floor’s rusted out. The same thing happens to school buildings.”

That realization is part of what’s driving the push to combine the district’s three traditional high schools into one newly built structure (a fourth, a career and vocational school, would be moved to one of the vacated buildings). The proposal is also a concession to numbers: Not only are the existing high schools aging, they also collectively enroll 1,500 fewer students than they have capacity for. Board members the plan — which also includes converting all middle schools into magnet programs and introducing a French language immersion system at one of the city’s remaining elementary schools — at a public Zoom meeting convened in May. But if enacted, it would be the biggest shakeup Manchester schools have seen in decades.

In an email, Mallory said the steps being considered were “indications of the stress that all [New Hampshire] districts are under.” If the status quo is maintained, he added, other areas “will also be closing or consolidating buildings in addition to cutting back staff and reducing supports for students most in need. That is, the budget and education program situation for such schools will only get worse.”

In the meantime, Hallsville elementary will end operations fairly quickly. Kym Prive, a parent who has sent three children to the school, said that even families without students currently enrolled have been saddened by the move to close a neighborhood institution. More poignant still is the fact that students lost most of the school’s last year to remote classes necessitated by COVID.

“We want to make it memorable for them, which is hard. Even looking at the yearbook, there aren’t as many pictures from this year of them in school. We’re hoping to be able to still do a good end-of-year send-off for everyone, since it’ll be the end of Hallsville altogether.”

Lead art by ����Ӱ��’s Meghan Gallagher (Getty Images)