VALLEJO, Calif. — Minutes before first bell, Penny Núñez-Brandão scanned the crowd outside Glen Cove Elementary School, looking for familiar faces.
“I don’t see any,” the fifth grader told her mom one morning this August. “None of my friends are coming.”
The start of a new school year can be nerve-racking under any circumstances. But for Penny and thousands of students across the U.S., this academic year brought the added difficulty of adjusting to an entirely new school after their previous one shuttered. As U.S. birth rates continue a multi-decade slide and state and federal education funding dries up, an increasing number of cash-strapped school districts around the country have resorted to closing campuses to save money.
A total of 1,156 schools closed during the last academic year — the highest number since the pandemic, according to an analysis of federal data by Big Local News at Stanford University. At the same time, new research shows student enrollment has fallen much faster than schools are closing — suggesting more painful financial choices lie ahead.
The Vallejo City Unified School District, a working-class district near San Francisco, serves half as many students as it did two decades earlier. District leaders have closed five campuses since 2025 – a quarter of its schools. They’ve also placed up to a third of all staff positions on the chopping block to help plug a staggering $36 million deficit.
Still, research shows closing schools rarely yields the financial relief districts hope for. Busing students to their reassigned schools, severance for pink-slipped staff and security for empty facilities often eat up any savings. School closures can also set students back academically and make it harder to attract teachers, who may worry the jobs aren’t stable.
Closing schools can also trigger a new downward spiral, as frustrated families flee to charter or private schools or other districts. In Vallejo, some parents said they chose to homeschool this fall or were planning to sell their homes and move to neighboring districts.
“Families are literally packing up their kids and moving away,” said Penny’s mother, Kimberly Núñez-Brandão, who already moved her older son to a competing charter school. She recently attended Glen Cove’s curriculum night for families and shared her shock at learning Penny’s new teacher had 32 students in his first-ever class.
“They already overwhelmed teachers with 30-plus students,” she added. “Who’s winning here?”
Rubén Aurelio, superintendent for Vallejo schools, acknowledged cuts and closures can be hard for families but said they are necessary to correct for school districts and budgets designed for a different reality.
“We’re not just closing schools to close schools,” Aurelio said. “We’re right-sizing a district that was built for significantly more kids. And if we’re going to actually improve outcomes for the kids we still have, we need to concentrate resources.”
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Nationwide, public school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students, roughly 3 percent, between fall 2019 and 2024, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal education data collected by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee and sociologist Jaymes Pyne. The total number of schools has declined, too – but only to about pre-pandemic levels, the researchers found, suggesting closures are lagging enrollment declines.
Lower birth rates are the primary reason for enrollment declines, but a federal crackdown on immigration and the post-pandemic expansion of private school vouchers and homeschool options have contributed to the decline. Bellwether and WestEd, two research groups, estimated in a recent report that declining enrollment could cause schools to lose $11.5 billion in state revenue annually by 2030-2031, potentially prompting widespread layoffs, cuts to academic programs and closed or consolidated schools.
In Vallejo, a city still struggling to bounce back from the closure of a naval base in the 1990s, enrollment has tumbled from nearly 18,000 in the fall of 2006 to about 9,300, according to the district. California has recorded one of the nation’s most precipitous enrollment drops. But school districts throughout the country, including large systems in Cleveland, Houston and Philadelphia, are facing similar closures.
Lydia Rainey, research principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education who helped conduct a recent survey on school district finances, cautioned superintendents and school board members against hoping that birth rates and student headcounts bounce back.
“That’s extremely wishful thinking,” she said, noting the tight finances facing many state governments and the shrinking federal footprint in education. “States aren’t about to open the coffers and swoop in with additional funds to save schools.”
The Vallejo school district is no stranger to budget crises.
In the early 2000s, mismanagement brought the East Bay district to the brink of bankruptcy. The state stepped in with a $60 million emergency bailout, which saved Vallejo’s schools from complete financial collapse but kept the district under state oversight until summer 2024. Around the time the state lifted the financial receivership, Aurelio took the helm as superintendent and soon recognized a new set of budget problems.
The district had used Covid-19 relief funding to pay for staff salaries, one-time funding that evaporated early last year. Meanwhile, enrollment dipped below 10,000 students for the first time and was projected to fall further. Vallejo schools, on average, were only 46 percent full, according to the district. Rising inflation and contractual pay hikes further strained the budget.
Aurelio and his team wasted no time in sharing the bad news with families. “I don’t think I ever said, ‘If we close schools.’ I started by saying, ‘When we close,’” he recalled.
In early 2025, the superintendent announced two rounds of closures: The first shuttered two K-8 schools at the end of that academic year. The school board also approved deep payroll cuts and the relocation of a district-sponsored charter school to one of the vacated campuses on Mare Island, an abandoned naval base with no public transit from the mainland.
Aurelio also set a December 2025 deadline for the school board to select three neighborhood schools to close in the second round and approve additional staff cuts.
The two-year tumult has left families wondering about their future in the district.
Caitlin Jackson and her husband, a facilities manager, moved to Vallejo with their toddler son, John, for the relatively affordable homes. But large class sizes and safety concerns dissuaded the new parents from enrolling John in a neighborhood school.
They’re taking a chance on the district-sponsored charter on Mare Island — for now.
“Trying to downsize a system while also trying to sustain it, that is just very difficult,” said Jackson, who added that she hadn’t ruled out private school or homeschooling.
Related: A school closure cliff is coming. Black and Hispanic students are likely to bear the brunt
The sentiment reflects a real risk for districts that choose to close schools. The already painful cost-cutting measure may push even more families into competing charter networks, neighboring districts or private alternatives — further eroding the funding schools get per enrolled student. That possibility in part convinced Aurelio to focus not just on cutting the budget but also giving students reasons to stay and attracting new ones.
It’s renovating the older campuses, in an attempt to draw younger parents who can’t afford to start a family in San Francisco. (That new spending has rankled some parents, including Núñez-Brandão.) The superintendent said he also plans to open a Tagalog-language school soon, in hopes of drawing more Filipino families from across the Bay Area.
More aggressively, the district has denied some requests from Vallejo families trying to transfer out (the state requires that both the student’s existing school system and the receiving school district approve of the transfer). It has also tried to preempt families’ departures by adding in-demand classes and offering tours of its remaining schools to showcase academic programs or extracurriculars they might have missed.
Jason Willis, a school finance expert with WestEd who has studied campus closures in the Bay Area, credited Vallejo for spreading the cuts and closures over several years, offering families some ability to plan ahead and have a voice in the final decision. The Tagalog school could prove popular among the local Filipino community, added Willis, who commended Aurelio for trying to show parents what Vallejo can offer. He likened the approach to the marketing that charter schools have long used to enroll students.
“He’s building a template and truly listening to the reasons that parents say they want to leave,” said Willis.
In its second wave of closures, earlier this year, the district shuttered three of its 10 elementary schools. A tour of one of them, Pennycook, on a recent weekday revealed what was left behind: three children’s coats dangling from a hallway rack, sunglasses and a packet of cookie frosting on a teacher’s desk, HVAC machinery that provides a tempting target for thieves. A facilities committee will eventually decide what to do with the vacant campuses, but for now they are vulnerable to burglaries, forcing the district to spend more on security, according to Marin Trujillo Cuevas, the district’s executive director for operations.
But if anything, he was more exasperated by the stacks of unlabeled boxes and classroom furniture that had been set to move to other schools but for some reason didn’t make it.
Inside the receiving classrooms that first week of school, the logistical strain showed.
Ellen Baker-Valdez, a third grade teacher at Glen Cove, had 34 children assigned to her classroom. She’d jammed desks tightly together, their backpacks and lunchboxes piled in a rolling bin by the door.
Outside another classroom, a mother cornered Aurelio, demanding to know why her son’s disability records hadn’t followed him to his new school. The child’s teacher — a substitute, like 7 percent of Vallejo’s teachers that first day — struggled to answer her questions and attend to the many crying students in her class.
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Marisa de la Torre, a managing director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, said instability created by school closures may last for a while. Studies from the University of Chicago show that academically, displaced students often suffer long-term drops in reading and math. That’s especially true when students end up at low-performing schools.
“It takes a while to recover, if they recover at all,” she said.
Núñez-Brandão isn’t sure she wants to stick around long enough to find out.
Five years ago, as her son prepared for his fifth grade year at Glen Cove, the district reassigned him along with Penny — then a kindergartner — to Highland Elementary due to scheduling difficulties during the pandemic. Highland then shuttered in the district’s second round of closures.
“They’re doing it all over again,” Núñez-Brandão said of her daughter’s experience this year. “And I can promise you: More schools are going to close.”
Weeks into the new school year, Penny still struggled with the transition to Glen Cove. She started to make new friends and said she feels comfortable on campus. She also liked her teacher, a first-year educator who’d joined Vallejo’s new teacher residency program launched last year to attract new educators and improve retention.
But with 32 kids in the class — Penny’s counted — she said it’s hard to concentrate.
And then, on a Tuesday in October, Núñez-Brandão received a note in the Glen Cove parent portal: Penny’s teacher resigned, effective immediately. The school will rely on a long-term substitute for now, the district said.
That night, Núñez-Brandão decided to call a competing charter school in Vallejo — a campus she and Penny already toured — and ask if they still have room for her daughter.
Cherry Salazar with Big Local News at Stanford University and Sharon Lurye with The Associated Press contributed reporting.
Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247, on Signal at nealmorton.99, or via email at morton@hechingerreport.org.
This story about school closures was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in partnership with the AP and Big Local News at Stanford University. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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