Can small schools survive?
- Joanne Jacobs
- Dec 9, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Dec 10, 2025
Lower birth rates, higher housing costs and more choices for parents have shrunk public-school enrollment in many cities. Now some of the immigrant students who filled half-empty schools are leaving too. The pandemic money is spent. It's time to balance budgets.
Yesterday, Cleveland's school board unanimously approved a plan to close or merge dozens of schools, reports Franziska Wild for Signal Cleveland. The district, which has lost half its enrollment over the last 20 years, plans to "reduce the number of high schools from 27 to 14 and the number of K-8 schools from 61 to 45" to balance the budget.
Small schools are on the chopping block in Cleveland, reports Patrick O'Donnell on The 74. MC2STEM High School, with an enrollment of 218 students, was "the crown jewel of a failing and nearly bankrupt school district — an 'island of excellence,' as officials once crowed, in a system in danger of state takeover." It will become a program within a larger school in a very low-income neighborhood.
The district is changing its strategy "from highlighting a few star high schools to keep strong students from fleeing, instead shifting toward offering more opportunities at all high schools," he writes.
Cleveland adopted the "small schools" approach promoted and funded by Bill Gates' foundation in the early 2000's, creating a "portfolio" of small, specialized schools that offered students an array of choices.
The district has "many small high schools with fewer than 300 students, each with the costs of their own principals and other support staff, but not enough students to justify always having sports teams, Advanced Placement classes, foreign language options" and career pathways, O'Donnell writes.
But the benefits of small schools are uncertain and the costs tend to be high. The closure plan is expected to save $30 million.
District CEO Warren Morgan says it's not fair to cut programs for most students while funding "pockets of excellence."
Small schools with high costs are an issue in Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, New York City and elsewhere.
My high school had only 450 students in grades 8-12, and one effect of its small size was that the administration and the teachers all knew all of the kids by name and face. This was true even of a student who never had a particular teacher--that teacher still could at least recognize the student. We still had loners and misfits, but most of us at least felt seen by at least one teacher, and that makes a big difference. Where I live now, one area high school has more than 5000 kids in grades 9-12, and there are multiple schools with more than 4000. I can't see how any average student feels like more than inmate #4321 in that…
These cities need realistic budget models, but scarcely even considered that idea during the Biden-Harris years, when unsustainable, borrowed money was flowing freely: Cleveland's solution, to retire a failing model and return to a previously failed model, almost certainly won't work; instead, it should prioritize opening vocational colleges of higher education, attuned to the economic strategy that municipal leadership should be developing, if it's not already in place.