A Broken Process: Baltimore City School Closure
On May 9, the Baltimore City School Board heard policy FCA on permanent school closure. Like many policies that come before the Board for review and renewal, the current draft includes substantial revisions to the policy itself, including changes to committee that oversees/guide closure, timelines, and data and accountability.
It isn’t enough. There should be a moratorium until and unless the District can demonstrate that closing a school helps young people and families more than it harms.
A Brief History of School Closure
The map is a visualization of closures since 2013 taken from the surplus schools list. Additional detail can be found in Google Maps.
Some of the schools on this list have been sold and are in use (e.g., Paquin is now Lillie May Carroll Jackson Charter School). Others have been long vacant; for example, Vanguard/Waverly Middle was closed in 2015 and returned to the city as surplus. A Request for Proposal (RFP) for the property was not released until April 2019. While the surplus website reports the project was awarded, the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation still lists the Mayor and City Council as owners.
When schools close, communities lose a valuable institution. To then have the additional harm of a vacant building atop that closure, especially when that building is poorly maintained — broken windows, peeling paint, overgrown bushes, weeds and trash accumulating — compounds that harm.
How Did We Get Here?
Going back a decade, City Schools contracted to conduct a district-wide state of school facilities report. Dubbed the “Jacobs Report,” the document provided a condition index of all buildings across the district. Baltimore City has the oldest school buildings in the state; 97% were built prior to 1985 (23% were built prior to 1946!). Given age, it should come as no surprise the condition of many facilities is poor.
Age does not automatically mean poor condition — think of well-maintained historic buildings throughout the city. But such maintenance requires money.
Baltimore City contributes a paltry sum to the school system’s capital budget (the capital budget is separate and distinct from the operating budget). For years, the city contributed a mere $17 million to capital improvement via its CIP program. While $17 million may seem like an enormous sum, in context it is quite small — divided among 75,000 students, it amounts to just $225 per child or a single dollar per square foot of space.
Mayor Pugh increased the CIP contribution to $19 million. And there it has remained, without subsequent increases, even as building costs (materials and labor) have risen substantially.
21st Century Buildings
In an effort to modernize the city’s school buildings, city leaders worked with Annapolis to pass H.B. 860, The Baltimore City Public Schools Construction and Revitalization Act of 2013. Following passage, Baltimore City Public Schools entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Maryland Stadium Authority, the Mayor and City Council, and Interagency Committee (IAC) on School Construction.
The 10-year MOU governs the interagency collaboration necessary to oversee the renovation and rebuilding of about 30 schools, in phases. The underlying bill authorized the Stadium Authority to issue revenue bonds of up to $1.1 billion. In addition, city schools, the state, and city itself would each contribute $20 million a year ($60 million total) to support construction. Eleven schools were part of first round of rebuilding, followed by 18 in the second round (29 total).
The MOU placed substantial conditions on city schools, including that the Stadium Authority would “have the right to withhold funding for future Renovations or Replacements (which are not yet in Construction) if the School Board fails to proceed with the Closure of a School Program or the Closure of a School Building as reflected on Exhibit 6.” It also required the school board to “establish both a final Utilization Rate target to be met upon completion of the 10-Year Plan Projects, as well as intermediate Utilization Rate.” The established utilization rate is 86%.
To pry money loose from the state and city, city schools agreed to close 26 schools and to maintain a high occupancy rate — between 8 and 9 of every 10 classroom seats filled. At a time after the Great Recession, when Baltimore’s population was holding steady around 620,000, perhaps that target was not cause for concern. Today, in a rapidly shrinking city of 575,000, an 86% utilization rate seems aspirational.
The renovations are beautiful but, perhaps more importantly, they provide amenities that were unthinkable when, for example, Mayor D’Alesandro broke ground for Medfield Heights Elementary in 1955. Modern HVAC systems to heat and cool, electrical capacity sufficient for computers and printers, internet wiring built-in rather than zip-tied along ceilings and corridors.
But even as the city undertook this substantial commitment to renovating and rebuilding, there was cause for concern: falling enrollment. In 2000, Baltimore had over 100,000 students. By 2013, that number had fallen to perhaps 85,000.
And it kept falling. By 2017, enrollment reached a 10-year low.
Which makes one wonder: Where would the city find the children to fill these new buildings over which so much political capital had been spent?
The Third Rail of Public Schools: Zoning
The enrollment decline must have caught someone’s attention because in Spring 2015 city schools put out an RFP for a rezoning feasibility analysis. The original solicitation is long gone from e-Maryland Marketplace but you can see the original document and addenda here.
Importantly, the contract was for one year, meaning the vendor would need to complete the work by 2016. The RFP addenda also required the vendor to, in collaboration with staff, “ensure that the Comprehensive Feasibility Study reflects input from an Advisory Committee regarding neighborhood and community dynamics, as well as potential policy impacts. The Contract Monitor will coordinate communications between the Contractor and the Advisory Committee during the scheduled bi-weekly status updates. Present to the Public its on-going Comprehensive Feasibility Study work on no more than three occasions during the Contract term. Public hearings shall take place at the beginning, midway, and final stages, and shall be led by the Contractor. City Schools shall facilitate the first hearing to introduce the Contractor and Comprehensive Feasibility Study goals.” [emphasis added; we’ll come back to it in a minute]
Bids are taken and the contract is awarded to DeJong Richter in early September 2015.
The same month, the Board approves a second contract with AVI Analytics for “demand modeling” in which the contractor was to “provide a quantitative analysis of City Schools’ student enrollment data on the selection of middle and high schools. Many pertinent questions will be answered through the analysis, such as:
- Which academic programs are students most likely to travel for?
- What additional academic or proximity factors impact students’ decisions to select and rank schools during the choice process?
- Do socio-economic and demographic factors determine whether certain students are more likely to choose and enroll in certain schools?
- Will new policies and programs impact student choices?
- How does a newly renovated building figure into a student’s enrollment decision?”
A year passes. No rezoning report. No community engagement. No modeling data.
Finally, in March 2017, there is an invite-only meeting at city schools regarding rezoning. You can read my scrawled notes here. I call particular attention to this bit from the FAQs provided at that meeting:
“Spot rezoning,” as in, a little adjustment here and a little adjustment there. The rezoning feasibility analysis, we were told, would be different. It would present options for comprehensive rezoning.
And to be truly comprehensive, we’d need to look at how students ended up where they did — because DeJong Richter told participants, right off the bat, that where you live in Baltimore is not tied to school enrollment, not for a substantial portion of children.
In much of the country, where you live dictates where your child attends school, unless they need a specialized program (say, for English language learners, or for special education, or because they’re homeless in which case they can continue attending their home school, thanks to the McKinney Vento Act).
But in Baltimore, for K-5 students, DeJong Richter reported that only 57% of children were attending their home-zoned school. The other 43% were almost evenly split between those attending charters (which, with few exceptions, are lottery-based enrollment) and those attending a different zoned school (for example, you are zoned for Barclay Elementary/Middle but send your child to Margaret Brent Elementary/Middle).
The AVI Analytics demand modeling analysis was supposed to provide insight into decision-making — what made caregivers say “no” to one school but “yes” to another? What factors drove young people participating in the middle and high school choice process to rank a school as their first choice? (For more on school choice, see my earlier post.)
The rezoning feasibility analysis plods along. In October 2017 there’s a presentation to the Board, “Update and Next Steps.”
The final report is released in April 2018: “The Rezoning Feasibility Study was driven by the need for the district to address the challenges of balancing enrollment and capacity across the district. The goal of this report was to identify potential approaches to efficiently align student populations to building capacity in a comprehensive manner to meet the long-range goals of the district. The district has not looked at school zone boundaries comprehensively in almost 20 years while most jurisdictions conduct comprehensive rezoning every 10 years.” [emphasis added]
Under Option 5, “redraw boundaries” the contractors wrote, “Existing zone boundaries were drawn over 20 years ago. Over time, Baltimore City demographics and housing options have changed across neighborhoods. Therefore current zones may not necessarily reflect current residential patterns and student residence locations.” [emphasis added]
We see those changes in population loss. Although the city as a whole is losing population, only a few neighborhoods are experiencing significant declines in student population.
What happened to the $233,200 we spent for demand modeling with AVI Analytics is murkier. I filed a Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA) request and got back slides; unfortunately, 50 of 70 were wholly or substantially redacted. You can see my request and related materials here.
The cover letter sent in response to the MPIA reads, “As background, in 2016, City Schools provided the vendor with student data, which was used to create a model that simulated choice decisions of City Schools 5th and 8th graders. After the May 2017 School Board presentation, the demand modeling project shifted to supporting the EC [Entrance Criteria] Work Group’s examination of the following focus areas: (1) adjusting entrance criteria; (2) closing schools; (3) opening more seats at specific schools; and (4) middle grades choice. For the remainder of the contractual period, the vendor ran multiple scenarios at the request of the EC Work Group, looking at potential outcomes if City Schools adjusted any of the focus areas. The vendor’s work products helped inform City Schools’ eventual implementation of the Career and Technical Education Master Plan, removal of entrance criteria at three Vocational Centers, and pursuance of its High School Plan. [emphasis added]
“Because the scope of the vendor’s work shifted, the August 2017 Board presentation did not occur. Additionally, the vendor did not produce a final deliverable or quantitative analysis on City Schools’ student enrollment data on the selection of middle and high schools. Instead, the vendor’s work products included choice results of special scenarios requested by the EC Work Group. The vendor also provided City Schools with a flat file of all student choice data for 2016–2019. In accordance with § 4–313, City Schools must deny inspection of this file since it contains personal student information such as student identification numbers and home addresses. Also, please note that the various models that the vendor created during the duration of his contract are proprietary and not in the possession of City Schools.”
It appears then that city schools paid AVI a quarter million dollars but rather than produce the demand analysis — a publicly contracted task— AVI did…something else…for which there is no public-facing report or documents, and certainly no public presentation to the Board.
Why this connection between school choice, zoning, and school closure? I’ll let the former Chief Academic Officer (CAO) explain:
In this 2017 report provided to the Board’s Teaching and Learning Committee, the CAO explains that students who do poorly in middle school and have low composite scores (at the time, based on grades, attendance, and standardized test scores) will be funneled into low(er) performing/non-selective high schools.
But what does that mean, truly? It means we concentrate a relatively small number of children — those able to achieve a high composite score — in a small number of selective schools such as Poly, City, and Dunbar. The remaining children go elsewhere, to schools that, on average, have much lower performance (aka test scores) and graduation rates. Those schools are them deemed “failing” (and sometimes designated as “comprehensive support” or “targeted support” from MSDE).
It means we track children. We purposefully, via policy JFBA, limit children with poorer performance to a specific set of schools. It means we accept that some significant proportion of young people in Baltimore City will fail to graduate because our Board-approved policies drive such practices. It means that families, knowing the range of schools where their child is likely to graduate in four years is quite limited, move, or send their child to an independent school. (When last I looked in 2020, something like a mere nine of 30 high schools had four-year graduation rates at or above 85%; I purposefully excluded alternative placement schools from my count.)
It means that Board Policy FCA on school closure doesn’t stand alone, as much as staff and some members wish it might.
Where Are We Now?
Despite the comprehensive master facilities plan, we are spending quite a lot of blood and treasure on renovating and rebuilding schools at the same time we are closing others.
We are spot rezoning and ad-hoc’ing our city’s education system in a manner that neither sufficiently acknowledges past harm nor reckons with current policies’ role in perpetuating that harm.
We are in place where the out-of-zone enrollment for K-5 is now 47% — up four percentage points since just 2017. That means half of children district-wide are attending a school other than their home-zoned one.
That’s not a system; it’s a menu. But to carry the metaphor, the full menu is only available to families with the know-how and social capital to enroll their child out-of-zone, and the means to transport them each day.
We are in a place where we are closing schools adjacent to those that are overcrowded. Take, for example, the cluster at the near center of the map.
The two blue catchments are Eutaw Marshburn (the smaller blue shape), which will close at the end of this school year due to poor physical plant and declining enrollment, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (the larger one, toward the south). The other schools are Dallas Nicholas (light green, school 39), Mt. Royal (red diagonal shape, school 66), Dorothy Height (larger light green, with just the bottom bit captured in the circle, school 61), Sandtown Achievement Academy (red, school 28), Furman Templeton (yellow, school 125), and Harlem Park (orange, school 35).
Within this small area, we have eight schools (albeit one about to close), all with varying enrollment but each with out-of-zone enrollment in excess of 46%. Mt Royal has two selective enrollment programs — Advanced Academic and Ingenuity — that draw students from across the city.
The schools in the far western circle are Dickey Hill (201), Edgewood (67), Belmont (217), Thomas Jefferson (232), Wildwood (88), and Mary E. Rodman (204).
The schools in the northeastern circle are Gardenville (211), Hazelwood (210), Garrett Heights (212), Glenmount (235), and Hamilton (236, also home to Ingenuity).
When we look at these areas, we should be asking: what’s driving enrollment? What choices are being made about where to place desirable and selective programs like Ingenuity? What choices were made about the neighborhood and young people and their families? What choices are being made now for the under enrolled schools (represented by green and blue) on this map?
At least one person was concerned enough about enrollment, equity, and school choice to talk about comprehensively revising boundaries in conjunction with the city Planning Department. Too bad Candidate Scott promised action Mayor Scott has not yet delivered.
What City Schools Says About School Closure
Revisions to Policy FCA were heard before the Board’s Policy Committee on March 21, 2023. At that meeting, staff presented a lengthy slide set. During that presentation, staff said, “…so in terms of research, national research on school closure is mixed. Studies consistently indicate that the quality of the receiving school really matters for student outcomes.”
If that’s true, then the closure of, for example, Eutaw Marshburn is puzzling. Eutaw Marshburn will be rezoned to Furman, Coleridge, and Dorothy Height. According to the state report card rankings (which, take with a large grain of salt, but the district uses them), Eutaw Marshburn is a two-star school and according to the Comprehensive Education Master Facilities Plan (CEFMP), it has a poor physical plant. Of the three schools to which students will be rezoned, two are also two-star schools (Furman, Coleridge) but Dorothy Height is one-star school. Of the three, two have poor or fair physical infrastructure ratings in the CEFMP; only Dorothy Height is new. Of the three, two (Dorothy Height and Coleridge) are themselves under enrolled; Furman is 84% enrolled.
Again and again, District staff purport that students will be moved to stronger educational environments. But their own data shows that is not always true. And if the research cited by staff say that the strength of the receiving building is the most critical, then we ought not move students unless we can affirmatively provide that stronger educational experience.
Later in the same video (29:11), staff highlight the positive results of school closure, “Another parent, again, sharing that feeling again that District communications were effective and talking about the changes she noticed in terms of the school after the merger. That the school now has gym, music, drama, more stuff at recess, full-time art and a full-time librarian, things they did not have before.”
To highlight the depth of educational deprivation in city schools as a justification for closure is stunning. The idea that students must leave their neighborhoods to receive arts education is appalling. No child and no family should be thankful that they have to leave their own neighborhood to get instruction that is already included in COMAR 13a.04.16.
Six weeks later, on May 9, the full Board heard changes to Policy FCA for the first time (“first reader”). (I testified at that meeting; you can watch my recorded testimony here).
At that meeting, Dr. Santelises said, “I wish we had all of the money that our young people deserve to keep schools open. I wish that there had not had to be deals cut in order to get new 21st century buildings to close others, but we had to make — and that’s what leadership is, is making those hard choices. And I also want to point out that we actually have not like proposed any new closures exactly for this reason and I think that’s important; this is not a churn every single year.”
While it may be immediately true that no new closures have been proposed this year, the latest CEFMP suggests they are coming as utilization rates fall alongside enrollment.
Future Planning for Harm Reduction
Data
A theme consistently raised by caregivers and some members of the school board has been data. Specifically, how do we know that children who are forcibly transferred or merged into a new school placement have access to those stronger educational environments touted by staff? How are those children faring in their new schools?
In previous meetings it is notable that although staff from Office of New Initiatives presented regarding Policy FCA we did not and have not heard from the district’s research services regarding what, if any, data exists.
Instead, staff have said that measuring change is impossible or difficult given changes to the definition of chronic absence, changes to state testing, missing data (e.g., state tests were not administered during COVID) and external influences like a state law that largely prohibits suspension of younger children in grades K-2.
Such longitudinal analysis is challenging. I am not a statistician but analysis often has to contend with missing data, so much so that there are methods for imputing missing data. Such processes can introduce bias and so the follow-on products would need to be considered in that light. To make it easier on the research and evaluation team, the district could consider pre-pandemic years as we have a list of school closures beginning in 2013. We could use national test data like NAEP, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card.
We’ve done such longitudinal work before, sometimes in partnership with the Baltimore Education Research Consortium. For example a seven year examination of pathways followed by students who were first-graders in the Baltimore City Public School System in 1999–2000.
And, of course, it is important to understand what any data is and is not showing or suggesting, and what advocates like myself are asking for. I’m not asking for a regression analysis with statistical significant and p values. Rather, I’m interested in descriptive statistics. Things like, on the whole, in the first year after transfer, did student absenteeism increase? What about three or five years later?
The BTU made an excellent point at the March 21 Board Policy Committee: “The BTU is concerned that the district does not collect or provide data to the public on what happens after a closure. So city schools educators are held up to incredibly levels of scrutiny in terms of the data that we collect on our students, which affects our evaluations, our pay, and our careers. However the district is not held to the same standard nor has it presented any evidence of the outcome after a school closure and we need that data to understand what we’ve done to be successful and how we can improve this policy moving forward.”
Through some combination of internal and public pressure, the latest version of Policy FCA presented May 9 includes a small (and wholly inadequate) section on data analysis: “After a school closes, and as soon as data is available, the CEO shall report to the Board at least three years of qualitative and quantitative data on the impacts of school transitions at receiving school(s). To the extent that data is available, these reports will be submitted to the Board by June 30 of each year.”
First, that section gives a definitive out; it only requires reporting if data is available. Second, although it names qualitative and quantitative data, specific metrics (i.e. attendance, grades, suspension and expulsion, promotion and retention, student and family survey data, etc.) are not listed in the policy or the associated administrative regulation. It is wholly unclear which specific metrics could or would be reported. Third, “submitted to the Board” means made available on the labyrinth website Board Docs. Board Docs is not especially easy to navigate, and, as far as I am aware, not available in Spanish or other languages.
Strategic Planning
A member of the SHAA Strong Coalition (a group of local parents, community members, educators, etc. opposed to the closure of Steuart Hill Academic Academy) spoke at the March 21 Board Policy Committee meeting. He read a statement by Board Commissioner Roberts from the Jan. 25, 2022 Board meeting: “I know that we have the 21st century plan. We did have that 10-year school plan but in terms of this vote, something that was highlighted for me, especially this portfolio review session, was every year we get recommendations for school closure. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen next year and that’s challenging for me. That’s challenging for families who plan. That’s challenging for communities to plan and engage. For someone that sits in my seat, if I’m here for the next three years I have no idea what the different should even be, and so every day that we are a collaborative partner to the larger Baltimore City ecosystem how are other partners able to engage with us if we don’t have a targeted, strategic plan?”
At that Jan. 25, 2022 meeting, the Board unanimously approved her motion: “I move that a targeted portfolio strategy be provided to the board that addresses but is not limited to the following: school enrollment and utilization, school community rezoning, current and projected impact on communities, age or condition of facilities, and financial considerations as well as the composition of the district’s portfolio of schools prior to any additional portfolio recommendations coming to the board.”
There is little to add to the approved motion except: Where is that strategy to address the mismatch between population trends and school enrollment?
Disposition
At present, city schools asserts they have no power to compel the city Planning Department to attend any meetings regarding the disposition of schools post-closure, as they are returned to the city as surplus.
While it is true that city schools cannot compel, I see no reason why the two agencies could not enter into a formal MOU that would, at minimum, outline some common expectations for engagement in the closing process and disposition of the building.
Closure of a school building is typically a long, painful process for communities. In conversation with University of Chicago, Eve Ewing terms this “institutional mourning.” She says, “[F]or most of us, if you were to go back right now, all these years later, and walk by your elementary school you’d probably see yourself right. There you go on that one day when you were late for school because something happened, or when somebody dared you to kiss somebody, or you know when somebody challenged you to a race and you won after you tried all those times and lost, or when you were embarrassed because you didn’t know the answer in math class…. You’re all these years and all those miles away but those are still part of you and there’s something about the place and about the building and the sight of these memories that is really special to people and it’s hard to put a monetary value on that.
“Many of the kids in these schools that closed had almost familial relationships with their parent, with the teachers, with their classmates. They also had multigenerational familial attachments to the school. So some of students go to the same school where their parents their grandparents went. They feel like this is part of themselves as an institution where their own lives find meaning and resonance and safety….In the book, I have an idea called institutional mourning which is a theory I put forth about the ways that, in some cases, we mourn institutions the same way we would mourn a human loss.” [emphasis added]
We need a formal or semi-formal process for disposition to allow this mourning, and to recognize it as such. The closure must ensure the physical building and grounds are maintained, post-closure — meaning someone must attend to peeling paint, the lawn and the playground, the windows. When buildings are left to decompose, or boarded over with cheap plywood, there’s a tangible, visible message: you don’t matter.
Last thoughts
In 2018, I wrote an article for the Baltimore Brew about how historical failures and (willful) amnesia created a situation in which about half of children district wide missed seat time because their buildings lacked air-conditioning, less than a year after they’d missed seat time because extreme cold caused HVAC failures and closure.
I concluded that article with, “Yes, money will fix the physical plant. But it won’t fix our declining population. For that, we need something vanishingly rare: Someone who cares. Even when it isn’t campaign season.”
I stand by those words. And I’ll add Eve Ewing’s much more eloquent words: “Since the origin of public schooling in this country there’s never been anything that’s an objective measure of school quality, because communities have always had divergent definitions of what they want their schools to do….I think it’s fair to talk about the idea of failure, but we also need to talk about moral failure. I think in Chicago there are at least as many moral failures of political leadership, and of the people that are supposed to be running our schools as there are ‘school failures.’ We talk a lot about one and not the other.”
And so too in Baltimore where we talk a lot about one and not the other.
