Dive Brief:
- DeKalb County School District is considering closing, converting or repurposing up to 28 schools, the large Georgia school system announced last week as part of an ongoing plan to address overall declining enrollment and to improve building use across both overcrowded and under-capacity schools.
- The district’s enrollment has steadily dropped from 96,603 students to 90,394 between the 2011-12 and 2025-26 school years. Meanwhile, DeKalb County has the current capacity to enroll a total of 107,774 students.
- The list of possible school changes at DeKalb County is not a finalized proposal. The district will collect feedback from the school board and its community this spring and refine the potential school scenarios this summer, with the board then voting on the matter this fall.
Dive Insight:
DeKalb County’s latest school closure and repurposing scenario was refined from a previous list after gathering feedback from thousands of community members.
The district’s Student Assignment Project committee has been leading the community engagement process and evaluation of these scenarios. Some 150 community members have been involved in the project for almost two years with the goal of addressing declining enrollment, maximizing resources and ensuring long-term academic sustainability for students, families and staff throughout DeKalb County.
“We recognize and do talk about the fact that currently there are disparities from school-to-school, whether it is outcomes, access to programming, or facilities, that are too great,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, a SAP Committee member, in a March 20 statement. “We need to close those gaps across the county, and this is our opportunity to do it.”
The focus of this project is the district’s facilities footprint, which is currently unbalanced, said Norman Sauce III, DeKalb County School District’s interim superintendent, during a March 20 press conference about the new scenarios.
“Some of our schools are overcrowded where students and teachers are competing for classroom space, access to programs, other school and district-based resources,” Sauce said. “And at the same time, some other schools have far fewer students than their buildings were designed to serve.”
That means some solutions to this problem may include expanding space in some schools to avoid overcrowding while consolidating others, he said. “Doing nothing is no longer an option for us.”
Sauce also acknowledged that school districts nationwide are going through enrollment shifts, and he said that schools in Georgia and specifically DeKalb County are no different.
Near DeKalb County, the Atlanta Public Schools’ Board of Education approved a plan in December to close or repurpose 16 schools amid declining enrollment. The Georgia district previously reported having a 50,000 enrollment during the 2024-25 school year despite having the capacity to seat 70,000 students.
Districts in several other states — including Ohio, Florida and Texas — have also decided to close or consolidate schools due to ongoing enrollment challenges, often driven by declining birthrates.
Some districts have rolled out short school closure timelines between the proposal announcement and the board decision phase, as seen with Texas' Houston Independent School District. The district’s board of managers voted to close 12 schools in February — just two weeks after Houston ISD made the initial proposal.
DeKalb County, meanwhile, is taking its time this year to engage with the community before the district’s school board makes any final decisions this fall.
Sauce said in last week’s press conference that DeKalb County is applying lessons learned from the district’s previous school closure decisions from nearly 15 years ago. He added that the district understands schools “are deeply connected to the identity of a community.”
“The future of our schools should not be shaped by numbers alone. Our children are not dollar signs. They’re not data points,” Sauce said in the press conference. “They represent real lived experiences and their families, too, and we honor that.”
