Closing or consolidating neighborhood schools is a painful decision that no school district or community ever wishes to face, but increasingly it may be on the table due to declining enrollment trends and budgetary pressures.

In this episode, host Jason Willis and school finance and policy veteran Carrie Hahnel deepen our understanding about school closures and consolidations. They delve into current factors that could lead to more closures and data showing how closures have disproportionately impacted different student populations. They pinpoint the tension schools and communities must try to resolve between difficult and necessary budget decisions on one hand and the enormous potential equity effects of those decisions on the other.

Carrie serves as a senior associate partner for policy and evaluation at Bellwether and a senior policy and research fellow with Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE). She and colleagues Max Marchitello and Dr. Francis Pearman co-authored a series of recent research for PACE related to declining enrollment, equity, and closures.

Jason and Carrie further explore how district and school leaders can proactively approach considerations about school closures while centering equity, and:

• The extent to which closures or consolidations achieved expected savings for districts,
• Connections between demographic trends, housing, segregation and other local issues to resource disparities,
• How the State of California has started to weigh in on the issue of school closures, and
• The importance for districts of pairing a school closure process with an affirmative strategy to provide students that will be displaced with high quality educational opportunities.

“It’s hard not to be paying attention to school closures if you’re paying attention to what’s happening in schools."

About Our Guest

Carrie Hahnel currently serves as a senior associate partner on the policy team at Bellwether, a national nonprofit. Previously, she focused on equitable school funding as an advocate at the Education Trust West, and as a policy director at the Opportunity Institute. She has worked extensively with the statewide research organization PACE. Her research has focused on school funding formulas, equity, tax policies and local budgeting practices and decisions, among other areas.

About Our Host

Jason Willis serves as Director of Strategic Resource Planning and Implementation for WestEd, and he is a former chief business official in several California school districts.

Key Resources

• Centering Equity in the School Closure Process in California – Report
• Declining Enrollment, School Closures, and Equity Considerations – Policy brief and related PACE Webinar.
• Examining Racial (In)equity in School-Closure Patterns in California – Working Paper

Budgeting for Educational Equity is presented by CASBO and WestEd. The series is written and produced by Paul Richman and Jason Willis. Original music and sound by Tommy Dunbar. Alyssa Perez and Hannah Jarmolowski at WestEd provides research and develops the written briefs that go along with each episode.