Most-clicked story of the week:
A number of large school systems nationwide are weighing closures and consolidations as enrollment and budget challenges persist at the start of the 2026-27 school year.
Among those districts is Los Angeles Unified School District, where Superintendent Andrés Chait recently divulged to the school community that enrollment in the nation’s second-largest school system has fallen from more than 700,000 in 2002-03 to a current projection of fewer than 400,000 students. A separate Sept. 15 presentation to LAUSD board members revealed an enrollment of 373,538 students so far this school year. At nearly 1% lower than the district anticipated in its adopted budget, that dip would amount to a roughly $60 million revenue loss, the district said.
Chait has said, however, that the district’s goal behind any decision on schools isn’t simply to reduce the number of buildings, but to have stronger schools and to lower costs.
The estimated number of days of learning lost during the 2024-25 school year as about 1 in 5 school districts had to cancel school at least once due to facilities issues, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Among the issues cited — which impacted some 2 million students — were plumbing emergencies, extreme classroom temperatures, indoor air quality and buildings’ structural problems.
K-12 funding in the courts
- U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley vacated the U.S. Department of Education’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion directive on Sept. 17, finding the February 2025 order and the agency’s related termination of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal teacher training grants unlawful. The cuts included over 100 grants from the Teacher Quality Partnership Program and the Supporting Effective Educator Development Grant program on the grounds that the programs trained teachers using “divisive ideologies.”
- Lawsuits filed against educational institutions over the past year by the Trump administration, which sought partly to revoke their federal funding over policies supporting transgender students and diversity, are continuing to advance in the courts despite some hurdles, including in a recent landmark case. In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice filed United States v. California Interscholastic Foundation against California and its governing body for high school sports, alleging “illegal sex discrimination against female student athletes” due to transgender students being allowed to play on girls’ and women’s athletic teams. The case was tossed in late August.
Challenges for school meal programs
- A study published this month in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that when free school meals were no longer available to all students, teachers reported that students’ ability to focus on learning was impacted by an increase in hunger and behavior issues. The findings, based on teacher interviews conducted after a pandemic-era universal school meal policy ended in June 2022, come as school nutrition and anti-hunger advocates fear more students will lose access to such programs in 2026-27 due to Trump administration-led policy changes.
- A survey by AASA, The School Superintendents Association found that 67% of superintendents said current funding levels are moderately or significantly hindering school meal programs. Some 2 in 5 district leaders said their school system’s funding had to be diverted from elsewhere in their budgets to cover the cost of feeding students last year. This included tapping into rainy day balances, deferring maintenance upgrades and even reducing spending on academic programs and intervention supports.
