Public school districts across the region are facing dropping enrollment, budget cuts, and other financial strains. Many districts are planning for school consolidation and closures as a solution.
Closing schools is one way to preserve resources and balance budgets, but it’s a deeply personal matter to families, teachers, administrators, and the broader community.
Two of the school districts that have announced they’re weighing options for school closures in coming years: Evergreen Public Schools in Washington, and Salem-Keizer in Oregon.
We speak with Will Denner, education reporter at The Columbian, as well as Eddy Binford-Ross, a Report for America Corps member who covers education for the Salem Reporter. They share more about the challenges the districts are facing and the solutions they’re deliberating.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Salem-Keizer. OPB regrets the error.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Many school districts in the Northwest are considering closing schools right now. This is in the face of dropping enrollment, budget shortfalls, and looming layoffs. And while closures might make sense for a district as a whole, it is often painful and personal for the students, families, and teachers at those schools. We’re gonna hear today about two districts in the region that are weighing options right now for school closures. In a few minutes, we’ll turn to the Evergreen School District in Vancouver. We start with Salem-Keizer schools. Eddy Binford-Ross is a Report for America Corps member who covers education for the Salem Reporter. She joins us now. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.
Eddy Binford-Ross: Thanks for having me, Dave.
Miller: One of the big issues behind both major looming budget cuts and proposed school closures is declining enrollment. Can you give us a sense first for how serious this decline is in Salem-Keizer Schools?
Binford-Ross: Yeah, enrollment decline has been really significant here in Salem-Keizer. Since before the pandemic, Salem-Keizer has lost about 5,000 students, and they’re anticipated to lose a couple of thousand more by the end of the decade.
Miller: What are the reasons for this?
Binford-Ross: There are two primary reasons. The first is that birth rates dipped during the pandemic, so that means that there are less students enrolling right now in elementary schools. The other reason is that more and more families are opting to send their kids to private schools, to homeschool those kids, to send them to co-ops, or to send them to online charter schools.
Miller: Which, I seem to remember from earlier conversations in 2020-2021, that too is not necessarily only tied to the pandemic, but those are trends that were exacerbated by what happened in the pandemic. I want to turn to school closures. How many schools is the Salem-Keizer District looking at closing right now?
Binford-Ross: Salem-Keizer is looking to close up to eight schools, all at the elementary level. This is about 20% of their elementary school portfolio. There’s talk of future school closures at the secondary level, but right now we’re just talking about up to eight elementary schools.
Miller: So almost one in five, 20% of elementary schools in the district. What are the district’s stated reasons for closing schools?
Binford-Ross: The biggest reason is this decline in enrollment. At the elementary level right now, for every ten desks that are allocated for students, three of them are sitting empty, and at seven of the district’s elementary schools, they’re seeing about 50 to 60% of their capacity. So, they could have 40 to 50% more students in those buildings, and that puts a lot of strain on conditions for teaching and learning. Those schools are less likely to have full-time counselors, they’re less likely to have extracurriculars, and there’s a lot more professional isolation for teachers that are in those schools.
Miller: So just to be clear, you didn’t mention saving money there. Where does saving money fall in the list of reasons that Salem-Keizer District is paying attention to when it’s talking about closing schools?
Binford-Ross: The district said that this isn’t to save costs at all. I was talking with the chief financial officer the other day, and she said that the district anticipates saving less than a million dollars per closed school, and possibly less depending on how much they have to spend to transition students to new schools.This may seem like a lot to you and me, Dave, but the Salem-Keizer’s budget is $1.12 billion, so a few million dollars in savings isn’t that significant.
Miller: How is Salem-Keizer deciding which schools might be on the chopping block?
Binford-Ross: That’s a complicated question. There are a list of 11 factors that the school board has told Salem-Keizer officials that they must consider, and these factors range from current school enrollment to projected numbers, building quality, future construction costs, ease of transportation, any inaccessibility that currently exists in the building that are hard to fix, such as a lack of an elevator, but district officials say that there’s no set formula for this.
Some factors may be weighed more heavily when closing one school compared to when deciding to close another. So while a lot of the information that they’re using to make this decision is public, it’s very hard at this point to tell how they will make that decision.
Miller: Well, what about the timing? When is it likely that the eight schools will actually be publicly named?
Binford-Ross: We will get a list a week from Friday, and at that point it’ll be a proposed list from the school district. It’ll be discussed on Tuesday, October 13 at the school board meeting, and then it will be discussed over and over again for the following two months before the school board votes on the list officially in December.
Miller: What have you been hearing from students and parents and community members about the school closure process so far?
Binford-Ross: There’s been a lot of frustration. This announcement was made in the middle of summer, and all of the decisions up till this point have been made during the summer or on the very first day of classes for the school year. So parents and community members and teachers have said that they don’t feel as if there’s been enough opportunity for the community to consider this, to engage in this process; and that they wish that the district had prolonged the process up until this point, so that they had more time to engage before we got a list of schools.
Miller: I want to turn to the larger budget issues that the district is also grappling with. How much money is going to have to be cut?
Binford-Ross: The district is anticipating having to cut $46 million this year.
Miller: Given that the vast majority of any district’s spending is on people – on teachers and staff – is this inevitably going to mean more teacher layoffs?
Binford-Ross: District officials say that it’s too early to plan because this number could change, but in Salem-Keizer, 95% of the general fund goes to staffing, and particularly salaries and retirement. So you can do the math, but the district said that it’s too early.
Miller: This is not coming in a vacuum though. Can you remind us, how many teacher positions have already been cut in recent years?
Binford-Ross: Yes. Since 2024, Salem-Keizer has cut about $93 million, and that has largely been through the elimination of 500 jobs across the district. And this includes both teaching jobs and classified staff such as instructional assistants. In this process, about 110 of these jobs have been vacated because of layoffs.
Miller: It’s been nearly a year since the superintendent of Salem-Keizer Schools sent a letter to the governor and the head of the Oregon Department of Education and legislative leaders who work on the Education Committee, arguing that the state uses flawed methodology to figure out how much money to give to districts per student. She says that some districts with higher numbers of families living in poverty, including her own, including Salem-Keizer, and some, say in East Multnomah County, in some rural districts as well, they’re getting less money than they deserve.
Conversely, and this is something that we talked about with Julia Silverman from The Oregonian, who’s done some reporting on this, it’s some of richer districts, richer comparatively, including Portland Public Schools, Lake Oswego, others, that are getting more money, so argues Salem-Keizer, than they deserve. That’s assuming a fixed pot of state education money. But again, it was a year ago that the Salem-Keizer superintendent brought this to the attention of state leaders. Has anything come from that?
Binford-Ross: Not really, but there is appetite from district officials and from our school board to really pressure the legislature to at least begin the conversation of reforming the state funding formula this coming cycle. So this January, I’d anticipate that there is going to be a lot of pressure from Salem-Keizer officials on the legislature to open up this conversation.
Miller: You are a product of Salem-Keizer schools yourself. The first time we talked, it was when you were a student journalist, still in high school in Salem-Keizer schools.You graduated in 2021. What’s it like now to cover your own alma mater?
Binford-Ross: It’s been so rewarding so far, Dave. As you mentioned, I first was on here as a student journalist. That’s when I fell in love with journalism. It was when I was the editor of the school newspaper at South Salem High School in Salem-Keizer Public Schools, and being able to cover the district that I grew up in, that I fell in love with journalism in, has been very rewarding. And it’s been great to hear from so many people who are excited to have someone covering the district who came out of it.
Miller: How have you seen the big picture issues change since you were a student there? It wasn’t that long ago. My job hasn’t changed in five years. You went from being a high schooler to being a college graduate, but now you’re back in the same district. How much has changed?
Binford-Ross: I think the biggest change has been enrollment. When I was in high school in Salem-Keizer, the biggest topic of conversation was overcrowding in schools. I had math classes where students were sitting on the floor because there weren’t enough desks to physically fit the number of kids enrolled at South Salem High School, and that conversation has totally shifted. We’ve lost 5,000 kids at this point, and so that’s been the biggest change since when I was a high schooler.
Miller: Eddy, thanks very much. I look forward to talking again.
Binford-Ross: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: Eddy Binford-Ross is a Report for America Corps member who covers education for the Salem Reporter. Will Denner joins us now. He is the education reporter for The Columbian. He wrote recently about impending school closures at the Evergreen School District in Vancouver, and Will, it’s great to have you on the show.
Will Denner: Hi Dave, thanks for having me.
Miller: What does the big picture look like right now for Evergreen Public Schools?
Denner: So this is a similar issue to what’s happening in places like Salem-Keizer, it’s a big enrollment decline over the last 10 years and subsequent budget cuts. For Evergreen, its enrollment peaked at just about 26,000 students 10 years ago, but enrollment has dropped by 21% since then, and there are similar reasons for that, between birth rates dropping during the pandemic, and families moving their kids out of public schools or just moving out of the state altogether.
And with less enrollment, districts receive less funding from the state. Evergreen has had to cut a combined $70 million from its budget over the last few years and anticipates having to cut another $12 million for next year’s budget, and they see closing schools as a way to save some money during these financial woes.
Miller: How has Evergreen gone about putting together its list of schools for possible closure?
Denner: The district hired a consulting firm, FLO Analytics, that advises districts on building consolidation and boundary changes like this. They identified a few factors for picking these schools, such as high school feeder patterns, geographic location, current facility utilization – meaning how much of a building is being used versus how many classrooms are sitting empty – and then the age of the buildings as well.
Concurrent with that, the district organized a Facilities Review Committee about a month ago to meet and discuss these scenarios before they make a final recommendation to the superintendent in December. There are about 50 people who serve on this committee, made up of district employees, a couple of students, parents, and even some community members and business owners who live in the district.
Miller: What stands out to you in the list of schools that the district leaders are considering right now?
Denner: I think the age of the buildings stands out the most. We’re looking at a side-by-side comparison of other schools, the five elementary schools, which are Fircrest, Hearthwood, Riverview, Silver Star, and Sunset. They are among the oldest in the district, built between the 1970s and early 1980s. Each of those schools are rated in fair condition,whereas just about every other elementary school was rated in good or excellent condition by FLO Analytics, and then the middle school, which is Pacific Middle School, is also in that same age range. It was built in 1983 and has an enrollment of around 800 students, which makes it both the oldest and smallest of the district’s six middle schools.
Miller: Is the idea that the district would close all six of the schools on this list?
Denner: Not necessarily. My understanding is the final number could very well be smaller than six. Superintendent Christine Moloney also noted at a recent school board meeting that some of these schools could be removed from consideration to be closed at future meetings, while others that are not currently on the list could even be added as this process plays out over the next two months.
Miller: How much is the district saying that they would save by closing these schools?
Denner: The district estimates it would save between $1.25 and $1.75 million for each elementary school closed, while a middle school would save approximately $2.25 million, but it’s worth pointing out that this is a very rough estimate that Moloney provided at that recent board meeting, and it’s certainly a question that we’ll need to circle back to when the district reaches a final decision on what schools they will close.
Miller: And it is worth noting that, based on what you’ve just said there and what we heard from Eddy Binford-Ross before, that it seems like Evergreen officials are projecting that they would save more money per closed school than Salem-Keizer officials are estimating that they would save. Something just worth keeping an eye on going forward.
In your recent article about this, you had a quote from Superintendent Moloney that stood out to me. She said this: “I recognize that this process is difficult. It brings uncertainty, fear, frustration, and sadness. For many people, a school is much more than a building. It is part of the fabric and identity of a community.”
What are parents and teachers and administrators or students saying about both the individual schools on the list right now, and the way that this list was put together?
Denner: I think there are some criticisms about maybe the messaging about starting this process, building the committee. I’ve heard from multiple parents and community members saying that they’ve talked to other folks who say that they just weren’t aware of it, it didn’t reach them, and in some cases, Riverview Elementary, for example, they don’t have anyone with ties to that school that’s represented on this committee, despite the fact that multiple parents applied to be on it but weren’t selected. Community members have also said that these schools are key gathering spaces, like the superintendent said, and they’re key gathering spaces outside of school hours, and they’re concerned about losing a community pillar if these schools were to be closed.
And then, on the teacher administrator side of it, similar criticisms with just how this list emerged. It was first mentioned at a recent Facilities Review Committee meeting, and it’s my understanding that the principals weren’t even notified until afterwards, and it was kind of this word-of-mouth process. There was a para educator at one of the elementary schools who also serves on the committee, who described being the first person to tell her principal that their school might be closed, and described it as a heartbreaking conversation. So I think there’s just been a little bit of frustration about the district’s communication and maybe being a little bit slow to respond to this list that came out.
Miller: So, what’s the process going forward? What’s gonna happen?
Denner: The Facilities Review Committee is continuing to meet about once per week from now until the end of November, and they’ll also host a pair of community info sessions, where other members of the community can also weigh in on this process. The first one is taking place, I believe, a week from today, October 5 at Wy’east Middle School.
Miller: What might happen to the buildings once they close? That’s an issue that I’ve heard a lot about in Portland. I imagine people in Salem-Keizer are talking about that as well. It’s one thing to say we’re gonna close the school, there’s no longer gonna be second graders coming to this every day, but what happens after that to the buildings?
Denner: It’s an interesting question. I know that a question was posed at a recent meeting along the same lines, and the district responded by saying that they’re looking into the costs to maintain the building, pay utilities and other factors, but it’s my understanding that the district prefers to keep ownership of these buildings, anticipating a possible future spike in enrollment.
Miller: Will, thanks very much.
Denner: Thank you for your time.
Miller: Will Denner is education reporter for The Colombian. He joined us to talk about the process that Evergreen Public Schools is going through right now as they consider closing a number of schools in the district. I should note that we are also following the school closure process happening right now in Portland Public Schools, and we hope to bring you a conversation about that in the coming weeks.
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