Webinar: When Schools Close: Community Impact and Responsible Reuse

The webinar, co-hosted by NCSI and the American Planning Association’s Public Schools and Communities division, explores the possibilities for managing school site reuse in ways that honor community interests. Shannon Jaax, Officer of Bond Planning and Construction for Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS), who led KCPS’s nationally recognized Repurposing Initiative, shared on-the-ground lessons from managing a portfolio of 30+ surplus school sites. Dr. Ariel Bierbaum, associate professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, drew on 15 years of research, including deep work in Philadelphia, to offer a broader analytical and planning framework for thinking about closure, disposition, and reuse.

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Some key takeaways: 

School closures are neighborhood decisions, not just facilities decisions. When districts make facilities decisions, they are simultaneously making decisions about neighborhood conditions and dynamics. Communities experience grief, anger, and fear when schools close. Therefore, intentional and carefully structured community engagement practices are essential for ensuring that reuse projects create benefits that are broadly shared. Facilities decisions need to be understood not just as discrete real estate transactions, but instead taken in the context of longer histories of place-based disinvestment and policy-driven inequities that have generated lasting harms in lower-income communities and communities of color. Paying too little attention to these factors can break community trust and risk setting back a district’s credibility for years or even generations.

City and regional planners should be actively engaged in school reuse processes. Both speakers made the case that city planners have important roles to play in helping districts work through planning for reuse — districts need their data, their facilitation skills, their expertise in zoning and financing for non-school uses, and their long-range perspective.  For example, school districts tend to project enrollment on shorter time horizons than municipal or regional planning agencies, which routinely project housing and demographic shifts 20-30 years out; this type of long-range data can help with gauging student enrollment trends and making decisions on school site disposition.

Evaluate your options carefully.  Be deliberative and strategic about which sites to hold onto, lease, or sell. Sites should be evaluated on geography, layout, building condition, and land value. Consider cross-sector and community partnerships that can create the potential to reuse sites for affordable housing, parks, non-profit hubs, office space, or other creative uses. The decision to dispose of a site should be made carefully, taking into account financial trade-offs and the long-range demographic picture.

Financing reuse can be complex and slow. Most viable projects require layered capital stacks (e.g. historic tax credits or low-income housing tax credits), and assembling those takes time. Additionally, districts often underestimate the holding costs of vacant buildings, such as utilities, security, and grounds maintenance, which may erode the savings projected from closure.  Interim or creative options for reuse – for example, renting underutilized space to non-profits – can create additional costs and complexities. All stakeholders need a clear-eyed view of the financial and timeline realities of different paths for reuse.