Dive Brief:
- Austin Independent School District’s board of trustees approved a plan Thursday evening to close 10 schools in the Texas district by the 2026-27 school year in the midst of ongoing enrollment declines.
- The closures will impact nearly 3,800 students who will be reassigned to new schools in the district and the plan will cut 6,319 open seats, according to Austin ISD.
- The move is expected to save the district $21.5 million, according to Austin ISD Superintendent Matias Segura during the Thursday board meeting. That amount more than covers the district’s budget deficit of $19.7 million this school year.
Dive Insight:
Segura said during the board meeting that developing and carrying out this school closure plan has been “a very difficult process.”
Most of the schools impacted by closures are at the elementary level, according to the district.
Segura also said he wished the district didn’t have to make this decision, “but the pressures are gargantuan.”
Austin ISD instructed 72,700 students across 113 schools in 2024-25.
When Austin ISD first announced it was considering school closures and consolidations earlier this year, Segura emphasized that the district lost over 10,000 students within the past decade, which led to a total of 21,000 empty seats.
While the district’s preliminary fall enrollment data has yet to be released by the Texas Education Agency, Austin ISD has said it’s likely that the number of students attending its schools will continue to drop.
In recent months the district considered several factors before proposing which schools should close, including size, condition, student enrollment and operational costs.
Elsewhere in Texas, Houston Independent School District laid off and reassigned hundreds of its teachers “to align” them “with student enrollment” as the district had previously projected a drop in enrollment by about 8,000 students this school year.
Houston ISD, which is under the leadership of the state, initially planned to announce a proposal this fall to close some schools during the 2026-27 school year. However, the district announced last week that Superintendent Mike Miles told principals he was no longer going to recommend any school consolidations to the board for 2026-27. There still may be a small number of consolidations needed in future years, the district said in a video update on Wednesday.
Texas' districts student enrollment declines are part of a larger trend across states and districts nationwide, with the downward trajectory straining budgets tied to per pupil funding. Reasons for declining enrollment vary by state and district. An ongoing decline in birthrates has been a common factor while other education leaders have cited this year’s federal immigration crackdown and newer school choice policies for detracting students from attending their public schools.
As a result, plans for school closures similar to Austin ISD's and teacher layoffs as seen in Houston are rippling across large and small school districts— from Arizona’s Kyrene School District to Atlanta Public Schools and Florida’s Broward County Public Schools to Oregon’s Corvallis School District.
