By Alec MacGillis, reporter at ProPublica

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.

In the nineteen-nineties, when Liberia descended into civil war, the Kpor family fled to Ivory Coast. A few years later, in 1999, they were approved for resettlement in the United States, and ended up in Rochester, New York. Janice Kpor, who was eleven at the time, jokingly wonders whether her elders were under the impression that they were moving to New York City. What she remembers most about their arrival is the trees: it was May, yet many were only just starting to bud. “It was, like, ‘Where are we?’ ” she said. “It was completely different.”

But the Kpors adapted and flourished. Janice lived with her father in an affordable-housing complex close to other family members, and she attended the city’s public schools before enrolling in St. John Fisher University, just outside the city, where she got a bachelor’s degree in sociology and African American studies. She found work as a social-service case manager and eventually started running a group home for disabled adults.

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She also became highly involved in the schooling of her three children, whom she was raising with her partner, the father of the younger two, a truck driver from Ghana. Education had always been highly valued in her family: one of her grandmothers had been a principal in Liberia, and her mother, who remained there, is a teacher. Last fall, when school started, Kpor was the president of the parent-teacher organization at School 10, the Dr. Walter Cooper Academy, where her youngest child, Thomasena, was in kindergarten. Her middle child had also attended the school.

Kpor took pleasure in dropping by the school, a handsome two-story structure that was built in 1916 and underwent a full renovation and expansion several years ago. The school was in the Nineteenth Ward, in southwest Rochester, a predominantly Black, working- and middle-class neighborhood of century-old homes. The principal, Eva Thomas, oversaw a staff that prided itself on maintaining a warm environment for two hundred and ninety-nine students, from kindergarten through sixth grade, more than ninety per cent of whom were Black or Latino. Student art work filled the hallways, and parent participation was encouraged. School 10 dated only to 2009—the building had housed different programs before that—but it had strong ties to the neighborhood, owing partly to its namesake, a pioneering Black research scientist who, at the age of ninety-five, still made frequent visits to speak to students. “When parents chose to go to this particular school, it was because of the community that they have within our school, the culture that they have,” Kpor told me.

Because she was also engaged in citywide advocacy, through a group called the Parent Leadership Advisory Council, Kpor knew that the Rochester City School District faced major challenges. Enrollment had declined from nearly thirty-four thousand in 2003 to less than twenty-three thousand last year, the result of flight to the suburbs, falling birth rates, and the expansion of local charter schools, whose student population had grown from less than two thousand to nearly eight thousand during that time. Between 2020 and 2022, the district’s enrollment had dropped by more than ten per cent.

The situation in Rochester was a particularly acute example of a nationwide trend. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, public-school enrollment has declined by about a million students, and researchers attribute the drop to families switching to private schools—aided by an expansion of voucher programs in many red and purple states—and to homeschooling, which has seen especially strong growth. In addition, as of last year, an estimated fifty thousand students are unaccounted for—many of them are simply not in school.

During the pandemic, Rochester kept its schools closed to in-person instruction longer than any other district in New York besides Buffalo, and throughout the country some of the largest enrollment declines have come in districts that embraced remote learning. Some parents pulled their children out of public schools because they worried about the inadequacy of virtual learning; others did so, after the eventual return to school, because classroom behavior had deteriorated following the hiatus. In these places, a stark reality now looms: schools have far more space than they need, with higher costs for heating and cooling, building upkeep, and staffing than their enrollment justifies. During the pandemic, the federal government gave a hundred and ninety billion dollars to school districts, but that money is about to run dry. Even some relatively prosperous communities face large drops in enrollment: in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where enrollment has fallen by more than a thousand students since the fall of 2019, the city is planning to lay off some ninety teachers; Santa Clara, which is part of Silicon Valley, has seen a decrease of fourteen per cent in a decade.

On September 12, 2023, less than a week after the school year started, Rochester’s school board held what appeared to be a routine subcommittee meeting. The room was mostly empty as the district’s superintendent, Carmine Peluso, presented what the district called a “reconfiguration plan.”

A decade earlier, twenty-six hundred kindergarten students had enrolled in Rochester’s schools—roughly three-quarters of the children born in the city five years before. But in recent years, Peluso said, that proportion had sunk to about half.

Within ten years, Peluso said, “if we continue on this trend and we don’t address this, we’re going to be at a district of under fourteen thousand students.” The fourth-largest city in New York, with a relatively stable population of about two hundred and ten thousand, was projecting that its school system would soon enroll only about a third of the city’s current school-age population.

Peluso then recommended that the Rochester school district close eleven of its forty-five schools at the end of the school year. Kpor, who was watching the meeting online, was taken aback. Five buildings would be shuttered altogether; the other six would be put to use by other schools in the district.

School 10 was among the second group. The school would cease to exist, and its building, with its new gymnasium-auditorium and its light-filled two-story atrium, would be turned over to a public Montessori school for pre-K through sixth grade, which had been sharing space with another school.

Kpor was stunned. The building was newly renovated. She had heard at a recent PTA meeting that its students’ over-all performance was improving. And now it was being shut down? “I was in disbelief,” she said. “It was a stab in the back.”

School closures are a fact of life in a country as dynamic as the United States. Cities boom, then bust or stagnate, leaving public infrastructure that is incommensurate with present needs. The brick elementary school where I attended kindergarten and first grade, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was closed in the early eighties, as the city’s population declined, and then was razed to make way for a shopping plaza.

Still, there is a pathos to a closed school that doesn’t apply to a shuttered courthouse or post office. The abandonment of a building once full of young voices is an indelible sign of the action having moved elsewhere. There is a tangible cost, too. Researchers have found that students whose schools have been closed often experience declines in attendance and achievement, and that they tend to be less likely to graduate from college or find employment. Closures tend to fall disproportionately on majority-Black schools, even beyond what would be expected on the basis of enrollment and performance data. In some cities, efforts to close underpopulated schools have become major political issues. In 2013, Chicago, facing a billion-dollar budget deficit and falling enrollment, closed forty-nine schools, the largest mass closure in the country’s history. After months of marches and protests, twelve thousand students and eleven hundred staff members were displaced.

Now, as a result of the nationwide decline in enrollment, many cities will have to engage in disruption at a previously unseen scale. “School closures are difficult events that rend the community, the fabric of the community,” Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford, said. He has been collecting data on declining enrollment in partnership with the Associated Press. “The concern I have is that it’s going to be yet another layer of the educational harm of the pandemic.”

Janice Kpor knew that her family was, in a sense, part of the problem. Her oldest child, Virginia, had flourished in the early grades, so her school put her on an accelerated track, but it declined to move her up a grade, as Kpor had desired. Wanting her daughter to be sufficiently challenged, Kpor opted for the area’s Urban-Suburban program, in which students can apply to transfer to one of the many smaller school districts that surround Rochester; if a district is interested in a student, it offers the family a slot. The program began in 1965, and there are now about a thousand children enrolled. Virginia began attending school in Brockport, where she had access to more extracurricular activities.

Supporters call Urban-Suburban a step toward integration in a region where city schools are eighty-five per cent Black and Latino and suburban districts are heavily white. But critics see it as a way for suburban districts to draw some of the most engaged families out of the city’s schools; the selectiveness of the suburban districts helps explain why close to a quarter of the students remaining in the city system qualify for special-education services. (The local charter schools are also selective.) One suburban district, Rush-Henrietta, assured residents that it would weed out participants who brought “city issues” with them, as Justin Murphy, a reporter for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, wrote in his book, “Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger,” a history of segregation in the city’s schools.

Kpor understood these concerns even as she watched Virginia thrive in the suburbs, then go on to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology. As Kpor saw it, each child’s situation was unique, and she tried to make decisions accordingly. “It’s where they’re at,” she said. “It’s not all or nothing for me.”

She enrolled her middle child, Steven, in School 10 for kindergarten and immediately liked the school, but stability was elusive. First, the school moved to temporary quarters for the renovation. Then came disagreements with a teacher who thought that her son’s behavioral issues stemmed from A.D.H.D. Then the pandemic arrived, and her son spent the final months of second grade and most of third on Zoom. For fourth grade, she decided to try Urban-Suburban again. He was accepted by Brockport, which sent a bus to pick him up every morning.

Other parents shared similar accounts with me of the aftermath of the pandemic closures. Ruthy Brown said that, after the reopening, her children’s school was rowdier than before, with more frequent fights and disturbances in the classroom; a charter school with uniforms suddenly seemed appealing. Isabel Rosa, too, moved her son to a charter school, because his classmates were “going bonkers” when they finally returned to in-person instruction. (She changed her mind after he was bullied by a charter-school security guard.) Carmen Torres, who works at a local advocacy organization, the Children’s Agenda, watched one of her client families get so frustrated by virtual instruction that they switched to homeschooling. “Enough is enough,” Torres recalled the mother saying. “My kids need to learn how to read.”

But, when it came time to enroll Thomasena, Kpor resolved to stick with the district, and she was so hopeful about her daughter’s future at School 10 that she took the prospect of its closure with great umbrage. She and other parents struggled to understand the decision. One of the reasons School 10 was chosen to close was that it was in receivership—a designation for public schools rated in the bottom five per cent in the state, among Peluso’s criteria for closure—but Kpor knew that the receivership was due not only to low test scores but also to the school’s high rate of absenteeism, which was, she believed, because the school roster was outdated, filled with students who were no longer there. According to a board member, the state had also placed School 10 on a list of dangerous schools, partly owing to an incident in which a student had been found with a pocketknife.

Making matters worse, for Kpor, was that the building was going to be turned over to another program, School 53, the Montessori school. It would be one thing for School 10 to be shut down because the district needed to cut costs. But the building had just been renovated at great expense, an investment intended for School 10, and now those students and teachers were being evicted to make room for others. “It was more of an insult,” Kpor said, “because now you have this place and all these kids and a whole bunch of new kids in the same building, so what is the logic of, quote-unquote, closing the school?”

The awkwardness of this was not lost on the parents of School 53. The school had a slightly higher proportion of white families and a lower one of economically disadvantaged students than School 10, and it was expected to draw additional white families once it moved to its new building. “The perception is that you’ve got the kids at this protected, special school—you can see the difference between what they get and what we get,” Robert Rodgers, a parent at School 53, told me. “If I was a parent at School 10, I would be livid.”

After Peluso announced the plan, the district held two public forums, followed by sessions at the targeted schools. The School 10 auditorium was packed for its session, and Kpor lined up at the microphone to speak. She asked Peluso if Thomasena and her classmates would get priority for placement in School 53, so that they could stay in the building. “I do not want her to go to any other school,” she said. “Every time we think we’re doing something right for our kids, someone comes in and dictates to us that our choices are not valid.” Kpor was encouraged to hear Peluso say that School 10 kids would get priority.