Atlanta

In a once-thriving neighborhood in the southeast part of Atlanta, Lakewood Elementary served families who came to work at the General Motors assembly plant, a sprawling 100-acre landmark that became a path toward economic mobility for entry-level workers. At its height in the late 1970s, the plant employed as many as 5,700 people. 

But by the early ‘90s, when Gloria Hawkins-Wynn moved into the community, signs of decline were evident. The last Chevy Caprice rolled off the assembly line in 1990, and a popular antique market at the now-defunct Lakewood Fairgrounds shut down in 2006. The closure of the elementary school two years earlier further contributed to neighborhood blight, turning the abandoned structure into a hotspot for criminal activity.

“We get prostitution. We get drug dealing. We get drive-by shootings,” Hawkins-Wynn told four years ago. A neighborhood representative, she urged city leaders to turn the eyesore over to a developer. 

Former students begged the city to save the school, home to some of their earliest : Dick and Jane books, dances in the auditorium, a principal named Mr. Hinkle. Still visible on the school’s deserted playground is a faded map of the United States.

“Please don’t demolish it,” wrote one woman. Walking to Lakewood with her mother, who died when she was 7, is a cherished memory. 

Now the old school is one of several in Atlanta It’s a transformation that is increasingly taking place across the country as city leaders and developers look to give new life to vacant buildings once bustling with students and teachers.

In 2024, nearly 2,000 apartments were built in former schools across the U.S., a record high and four times the number a year earlier, according to from RentCafe, a property search website. School-to-apartment conversions are now the fastest growing segment of a niche industry devoted to makeovers of historic spaces. 

As student enrollment nationwide and more districts, including Atlanta, make the painful decision to close schools, the Lakewood project offers a glimpse of what’s to come: Seventy-four school conversion projects are already underway across the country, RentCafe’s data shows. With enrollment loss in traditional schools , districts will be left with even more surplus properties. 

Renovating existing structures “offers a way to help those buildings continue on as community assets,” said Patrice Frey, president and CEO of RePurpose Capital, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

For the first time since the Great Depression, renovation projects, including historic preservation, surpassed new construction in 2022, according to the . Supply chain gridlock and “the rapid escalation of materials costs” likely contributed to the shift, Frey said.

The pandemic also played a part as parents chose charter schools or uprooted to other districts and states to find in-person learning. The rapid expansion of private school choice has also contributed to enrollment declines, school consolidations and closures.

Data from the Brookings Institution showed that between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years, 12% of elementary schools and 9% of middle schools lost at least one-fifth of their students. Many districts delayed closures in response to parents and generations of former students who pleaded with leaders to keep the neighborhood institutions open. Some districts, , are still putting it off.

But maintaining underenrolled schools, especially those with just a couple hundred students, can be a financial drain. The , and districts are among those that have recently announced or discussed closures. That means they’ll eventually have to decide what to do with the buildings.

An earlier Atlanta project, completed in 1999, offers a preview of what’s in store for Lakewood and many other former schools. was redeveloped into Bass Lofts, a three-story structure that sits in a bohemian neighborhood known for vintage clothing stores, dive bars and record shops. Mallory Brooks, a photographer, moved into one of the units 10 years ago after relocating from Florida.

“It was the first place I looked at, and I was definitely smitten,” she said. Stepping through the main entrance, “you are transported immediately to being in a school.” 

Old lockers, welded shut, line the ground floor hallways, and a large Depression-era mural of women dancing sits above the stage in the auditorium. While rows of seats remain intact, some tenants also use the space to store their bikes. Brooks appreciates how sunlight pours through the 10-foot-high windows — “I’ve been able to basically create a greenhouse in my apartment,” she said. But regulating the temperature is difficult, and she looks forward to HVAC upgrades. 

‘Legacy residents’

Lakewood Elementary is one of eight sites that the Atlanta Public Schools is now repurposing through an agreement with the Atlanta Urban Development Corp., a nonprofit arm of the city’s housing authority that renovates historic properties into mixed-income residences. The plan, part of to increase affordable housing, includes giving teachers the first choice of apartments. That was important to Cynthia Briscoe Brown, a former Atlanta Board of Education member whose last vote in December was to . 

“Seventy percent of APS employees do not live within the city limits of Atlanta,” she said. “One of the board’s priorities in developing these properties is to make it possible for our employees to not have to drive so far before their work day.” 

A lawyer with experience in real estate, she took an interest in the dilapidated properties when she was first elected in 2013. But she also has personal ties to the site where Peeples Street Elementary, one of the eight former schools, once stood. Her father, Woodson Briscoe, attended the school, which sat just down the street from the boarding house, run by an aunt, where the family lived. 

“This was the Depression. They were a young couple with a family, and they couldn’t afford their own house,” she said. Today, as in the neighborhood climb, with some homes priced well over $500,000, families are facing the same problem. “The West End is gentrifying to a point where a lot of legacy residents are having trouble staying.” 

‘A pall over neighborhoods’ 

Peeples Street closed in 1982. has been gone for 30 years, torn down after a fire left little worth saving.

But some shuttered schools can sit vacant for decades, attracting crime and casting “a pall over neighborhoods,” Alyn Turner, a sociologist with Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, told a group of Atlanta leaders in February. 

In a hotel east of downtown, they gathered in a dining room to discuss ways to lessen the negative impacts of the upcoming closures on both students and the neighborhoods where they live.

Turner cited a showing that between 2005 and 2013, 12 urban districts, including Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh, sold, leased or repurposed 267 school properties, but still had more than 300 on the market. 

School closures “tend to concentrate in communities that have already experienced displacement and disinvestment,” she said. “People can experience a closure as yet another signal of neighborhood decline.”

In Gary, Indiana, a rising number of 911 calls near abandoned schools — an almost 600% increase between 2022 and 2024. They found fires, hundreds of requests for extra police patrols and 26 reports of “shots fired.”  In 2015, a was found dead in Emerson High School, a Four years later, three teenagers fatally shot a woman and in an emptied-out elementary school.

Like any abandoned building, a boarded-up old school can “provide cover” for criminals, according to at Arizona State University. Run-down, vacant structures can even escalate criminal behavior, they write, sending a message that no one owns or cares about the property.

Maintaining former school buildings until they’re sold or repurposed can make the neighborhood feel safer, Turner told the Atlanta group. But like Briscoe Brown, some participants said they worry about the opposite effect — gentrification that leaves some lower-income families behind.

“How can you help the people who are still there?” asked Femi Johnson, a senior director at Achieve Atlanta, a nonprofit that focuses on college access. “Can it be a food bank? Can it be a community health center?”

In her hometown of Philadelphia, she saw the former Edward Bok Vocational School, part of a wave of closures in 2013, transformed into an event space with , a destination she felt didn’t serve the community’s needs.

Developers are drawn to former schools because of their historic architectural features, like wide hallways and stairwells. The former Monsignor Coyle High School in Taunton, Massachusetts, now , boasts “soaring ceilings” and original windows. 

Tax credits for historic preservation can offset some of the costs of modernization, but come with restrictions on what developers can change and which “character-defining features,” like a gymnasium, must go untouched, said Pittsburgh developer Rick Belloli.

In 2022, his company, Q Development, Mt. Alvernia, a former Sisters of St. Francis convent and all-girls school north of Pittsburgh. He described the massive, 333-room main building, the Motherhouse, as “a gloriously spectacular historic building” with cast iron stairways and arched ceilings. But he’s still navigating the approval process, and some developers, he said, avoid former schools because of those hurdles. 

‘Choice properties’

Like Coyle and Mt. Alvernia, many of the school-to-apartment conversions are concentrated in the northeast and midwest. Columbus, Ohio, ranked first on of cities with the most school conversion projects. 

Next on the list is Cleveland, where the former Martin Luther King Jr. High School, in the predominantly Black , was among those affected by more recent enrollment loss. In 2020, the district , which had dropped to less than 350 students, and a Maryland-based developer for $880,000.

Exploring one of Cleveland’s abandoned high school’s

Last fall, knowing the building might be demolished, former students gathered to reflect and grab what mementos they could. Some cut strings off the basketball hoops, said Ronald Crosby, who attended in the late 1980s. Others took old library cards and team jerseys. 

Ronald’s sister Johnetta Crosby has fond memories of the school. “We had teachers that took their time to make sure you learned,” she said. “If you didn’t have anything to wear, they made sure you did. If you couldn’t afford to eat lunch, they fed you anyway.”

D’Angelo Dixon, who graduated in 2018, felt more conflicted. “Black stuff” leaked from the ceiling, he remembered, and academically, he felt behind friends who attended other schools. 

“Once I went to college, I felt like I didn’t know anything,” he said. But he credited the school’s career-tech program with inspiring him to work in health care. He’s now a nursing assistant. At the alumni gathering last year, he headed for the art room to grab a ceiling tile he painted with his nickname, Delo — part of a senior class assignment.

Some alumni hoped the developer, Kareem Abdus-Salaam, would save the building but that’s not part of his vision for the new residential community, a mix of apartments, townhomes and retail space.

“I really want to just level the whole site and bring it up, almost like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” he said. He expects to break ground this spring. “There are so many abandoned schools in this country that are sitting on choice properties.”

He does, however, intend to make use of the large stones that still border one corner of the property by crushing them into gravel for a quarter-mile walking trail that will wind through the development. Along that pathway, he plans to erect signposts with historical photos of the school so former students “can have some feeling of yesteryear.” 

In Atlanta, the partnership between the school district and the city gives officials a say in what the developers preserve. They’ll integrate the original Lakewood Elementary building into the overall design. 

With a strip of commercial properties on the corner, including a popular restaurant and coffee shop, Hawkins-Wynn, who still lives a few blocks away, hopes the redevelopment will spur even more investment in the neighborhood.

On a recent afternoon, the transition was obvious, but so were the obstacles in its path. As she walked the perimeter of the property, a construction crew put up plywood on a new home across the street. A few lots down, trash and discarded mattresses piled up on the curb.

“This is why we need redevelopment,” she said, pointing to the debris. “It’s still shady around here, but it’s changing like you won’t believe.” 

The nation’s second-largest school district now enrolls 408,083 students, according to . In the 2023-24 school year, LAUSD enrolled 419,749 kids; the year before that, 429,349.

“I’m kind of fearing talking about it, because people are just going to go berserk,” said LA Unified Board President Scott Schmerelson of decisions to close schools. 

Schmerelson also insisted he has not given up on finding ways to increase district enrollment with programs that would attract new families to LAUSD schools. 

But, he said, enrollment has fallen so low that many of the district’s schools can’t provide the services students require.

To preserve the quality of instruction, Schmerelson said, some of the district’s 785 public schools may soon need to be combined or closed. 

“We’re just getting worse and worse as far as enrollment goes, and average daily attendance,” said Schmerelson. “Every time a kid comes to school, we’re paid for that day. And when they don’t show up, we’re not paid for that day.”  

LAUSD has been losing students since it peaked in size at 746,831 in 2002. District officials have talked about tackling the enrollment drop for almost as long. Losses accelerated during the pandemic and then slowed, but have since gone up again.  

LAUSD has made a number of efforts to attract new students, mainly based around the idea of offering attractive schooling choices to local families, a district spokesman said. The enrollment declines this year were smaller than expected, according to the spokesman. 

But shrinking schools are bad for students. 

Like many U.S. public school districts, LA Unified is funded on a per-pupil basis. So when the district loses students, it loses income.

Schools with too few students don’t receive the funding to offer extracurricular activities and a variety of enriching classes. They retain fixed staffing and facilities costs, so operations become more expensive on a per-pupil basis, as enrollment shrinks.

Schmerelson, a veteran LAUSD educator and administrator who of the district’s school board last year, believes the district’s enrollment crisis is its most pressing problem and has vowed to tackle the issue in his last term.

He said he expects the board to soon begin discussing the sticky issue of closing or combining under-enrolled schools. Those that become too small, he said, with fewer than 100 students, aren’t viable from a cost or programming standpoint.

In a statement, a Los Angeles Unified spokesman said that there are three schools in the district with fewer than 100 students. The spokesman said the district will not be combining or closing schools this year.

Decisions to close schools are often controversial with the families they serve and the staff they employ. Closing a school is seen as a last resort in many districts, not only because it represents the loss of an asset, but also a loss to the community.   

Enrollment decline is a nationwide problem. School closures in response to such declines have recently prompted pushback in and San Antonio.

In Inglewood, an independent school district in Los Angeles County, plans to close schools have .   

But in Los Angeles, where enrollment has been declining for more than 20 years, many fear closing schools is inevitable.

Conditions such as falling birth rates and rising housing prices have forced LA’s enrollments down for years, and those forces can’t be stopped without seismic changes to economy and demography, said Pedro Noguera, dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education. In addition, independently operated charter schools have enrolled thousands of LA students.  

In other words, get used to it. And it’s not just in LA. Enrollments are falling in districts around the country, thanks to the same forces that are driving down enrollment in LASUD, Noguera said.

“This is the future,” said Noguera. “Declining birth rates, plus families with children who can’t afford to live in the city.”

LAUSD has no choice but to figure out how to consolidate schools, said Noguera. But, if officials are strategic, he said, they should see it “not simply as a loss of a school, but as an opportunity to create schools that are better equipped to serve the community.”

Any changes to schools in LAUSD would be considered by the board with Superintendent Aberto Carvalho, who in the last school year was possible.

Schmerelson said he expects the board will soon discuss combining schools due to falling enrollments, while also working on new solutions to attract new students.   

Former , who consults with districts and labor groups on policy and operations, said the LA Unified’s focus on attendance in the years since the pandemic has been laudable, but now it needs to shift its attention to enrollment.  

Tokofsky said LAUSD needs to be fighting enrollment declines with more aggressive plans to attract families, and maximize resources in shrinking schools.

Decisions to close schools are fraught with hazards, he warned.

“This requires urban planners and big thinkers,” said Tokofsky. “Otherwise, the whole school board will get recalled.”

She’s called on a Massachusetts-based consulting firm, SchoolWorks, to lead an of the system. Based on the deplorable condition of many schools and the “exceptionally low bar” for instruction found by Johns Hopkins University in 2019, the district needed extensive work. But it has made some positive strides, slowed somewhat by the pandemic.

“What we don’t want is that has been made to slide backwards,” she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Providence has also seen a sharp decline in enrollment since the state took over — an almost 17% drop, according to a from a state policy organization.

Like most communities, Providence faces resistance to closing or consolidating schools. Its Infante-Green’s move to with another school on the same site. with help from a $3 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation, 360 High offers students a smaller, more personalized learning environment. Families sued over the closure, saying it would violate the of the many English learners who attend. 

But Infante-Green, herself an English learner who began her career as a bilingual educator in New York City, said students at the school are missing out on critical programs that can prepare them for college.

“This school did not give kids AP courses. It’s not accredited,” she said. After the merger, they’ll have access to honors classes and the opportunity to take college courses.

The state of the district is one of numerous issues Infante-Green is navigating at home as she takes on a more prominent role nationally. In October, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the collection of tests known as the ,

Scott Marion, another member of the board and director of the nonprofit Center for Assessment, said state and local education leaders bring a practical outlook that researchers and testing experts sometimes lack.

“We absolutely need chiefs like AngĂ©lica on NAGB,” he said. “In many ways, they’re one of the prime audiences we hope use NAEP results.”

Infante-Green sought help from Marion’s center in 2021 to better understand the extent of pandemic learning loss. Her department spent on mid-year tests at a time when statewide assessments were canceled. Those snapshots of students’ learning allowed  researchers to map how long it might take students to get back on grade level.

“We had that data in real time,” she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, “and we were able to figure out what kind of support we needed to put in place.” 

In a wide-ranging interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Infante-Green also discussed the state’s efforts to wean districts off federal relief funds and measure the additional money’s impact.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re among the state superintendents who began their tenure before the pandemic. What kind of perspective does that give you on recovery? 

The leaders that were here before the pandemic, during the pandemic and are still here — and there aren’t too many of us — we do see a couple of things. One is the way that we were able to pivot and do things in such short fashion. That tells us the possibility of what we can do moving forward. I think that is really exciting. We have also seen how tired people are. I have to think about how we support people, how we do our work differently, how we innovate.

With relief funds, we were able to pay for interim assessments so we could have data at the state level. We met with superintendents, and we talked about the areas that we really needed to focus on. Everybody thought it was going to be the older grades, but it was really the younger kids that were impacted, and we had that data in real time.

Speaking of data, the from Harvard and Stanford universities gives us a district-level view of how students are doing that we don’t get from the National Assessment of Educational Progress or from the , which has only 27 districts. Do you see more collaboration between NAEP and researchers in the future to do that work?

I do see more opportunities. We’re all in a place where we think that the things that we’ve done have made an impact, but we haven’t really done the research nationwide to pinpoint that exactly. We know that tutoring has helped. 

We see the benefit of kids having more hours. In Providence in particular, we negotiated with the teachers union to get an a day, which is an extra 15 days a year. Gov. Dan McKee also has this program called , where mayors open centers so kids can go there after school, Saturdays, even Sundays. We’re not even calling it remedial. It’s about really doubling down on the things that they need. 

I wanted to shift to one of the biggest topics on everyone’s mind, the expiration of federal relief funds and the so-called fiscal cliff. Do you expect to apply for an extension? 

I don’t foresee us applying for it. Our districts have been doing a good job of getting the kids the support that they need. But I am going to be the number one advocate for continued funding. I know that there’s no appetite for it in Washington, but there has to be. 

Inline pullquote: “I am going to be the number one advocate for continued funding. I know that there’s no appetite for it in Washington.”

Our math scores are back to where they were pre-pandemic, but we don’t think that’s where we should be. We should be moving forward. We want to continue to make progress. It almost seems unfair that now we’re just going to say, “OK we see these things work, we’ve seen results and now we’re just gonna take it away.” 

How is Rhode Island preparing, and what concerns you? 

The birth rate is down. We knew that was coming. Across the nation, they’re closing school buildings, laying off employees. We held districts harmless for two years with their enrollment loss. And this is the that they’re going to get 40% of funding for each student they lost. Then the second year they’re going to get 25% of that funding so there isn’t just a cliff.

Where’s that money going to come from? 

It’s coming from the state, and I hope it continues. There is this desire to have a gradual decline as opposed to the money just going away. It’s not just the expiration of relief funds. It’s also the decline in population. 

How much of a cushion is that for districts? 

It’s not going to be much, unfortunately. They are going to have to get rid of staff. Many of them have coaches that will probably be gone. I think the mental health positions are going to be gone, which is really worrisome. These positions really helped kids transition back into school.

Inline pullquote: “They are going to have to get rid of staff. Many of them have coaches that will probably be gone. I think the mental health positions are going to be gone, which is really worrisome.”

We’ll lose not just positions, but support. Tutoring after school is going to be very difficult to do. For Providence, those are going to go away. All the districts are going to have a deficit.

What has the state done to try to measure the impact of those funds? 

We know how much districts received, how they spent their money and if they had tutoring. We try to tie the tutoring to actual results. For example, Providence ran spring academies last year and this year — at a time when schools are usually closed in February and in April. And let me tell you, the kids showed up. They still need the support, academically. We have something called the [which requires teachers to be trained in the science of reading]. By 2025, our K-8 teachers will all be trained, but we’re at about 75 percent. Some are in their second year. We can track the kids that have been with them to see what’s worked.

We’re going to have limited funds. What are we going to invest in? What are we going to really keep our eye on?

You mentioned some specific efforts in Providence, and I know a lot of families there are anxious for different reasons. Families worry about school closures. Others are trying to get into charters, but there isn’t enough space.  What do you say to families in traditional schools as well as those on waiting lists for charters?  

I believe in families having the ability to be in the best school for their kid, whether that be our traditional schools or our charters. I’ve been pretty clear on that. What’s interesting about Providence is that about 19,000 children apply to charter schools and there are only 22,000 students in the district. So they want charter schools. But my role in this intervention is also to ensure that the existing schools are high-quality. That may feel uncomfortable for certain people. 

Inline pullquote: “What’s interesting about Providence is that about 19,000 children apply to charter schools and there are only 22,000 students in the district. So they want charter schools.”

Last year, we closed down two schools [Lauro and Feinstein elementary schools]. With , we fixed the roof three times and it continued to leak. And there was a sewer leak in the basement. It was awful. Nobody should have been in that building. The other building, it kept raining inside. Teachers had buckets by the windows to collect rain. It costs a lot of money to heat and run those schools. We have to start making decisions for the district that are fiscally and educationally sound.

Nobody really likes change, but we have to think about the district as a whole. It’s happening nationwide. 

At the same time, you have to think about the demand for seats in charter schools. , a charter advocacy group, says there were 31,000 applications for charter schools for next school year, an increase over 2023-24 of more than 3,000.

These schools that we’ve closed down, we don’t . The mayor owns the buildings. Charters are welcome to apply for buildings that have been taken offline.

Charter schools go through a rigorous application process. We had expansions, so the numbers will be growing, but it will be the same providers at this point.

Finally, what needs to happen for Providence schools to return to local control?

We said that in 2024, we’d look at how much progress has been made. But when that was decided in 2019, nobody anticipated a pandemic. There are things that have to be true — whether it’s structurally sound, whether the board is ready to take it back, whether the city is fiscally able to support the district. 

What we don’t want is some of the progress that has been made to slide backwards.