Week in Review: Are More School Closures and Consolidations Ahead?
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As the 2026-27 school year gets underway, several of the nation’s largest school systems are again weighing school closures and consolidations, with enrollment declines and budget pressure leaving few easy options.
Los Angeles Unified School District is among them. Superintendent Andrés Chait recently told the school community that enrollment in the country’s second-largest district has fallen from more than 700,000 students in 2002-03 to a current projection of fewer than 400,000. A separate Sept. 15 presentation to LAUSD board members put enrollment at 373,538 students so far this school year. That is nearly 1% below what the district assumed in its adopted budget—a shortfall the district said would translate to roughly $60 million in lost revenue.
Chait has said the goal is not simply to shed buildings. Any decision about schools, he has argued, should be driven by a push for stronger schools and lower costs.
Number of the week: 3.5M
That is the estimated number of learning days lost during the 2024-25 school year, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, after about 1 in 5 school districts had to cancel school at least once because of facilities problems. The issues—ranging from plumbing emergencies and extreme classroom temperatures to poor indoor air quality and structural failures—affected roughly 2 million students.
The week also brought a legal setback for the U.S. Department of Education. On Sept. 17, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley vacated the department’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion directive, finding that the February 2025 order and the agency’s related termination of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal teacher training grants were unlawful. The cuts included more than 100 grants under the Teacher Quality Partnership Program and the Supporting Effective Educator Development Grant program, which the department said trained teachers using "divisive ideologies."
Meanwhile, lawsuits the Trump administration has filed against educational institutions over the past year—part of an effort to revoke federal funding over policies supporting transgender students and diversity—continue to move through the courts, despite some setbacks. In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice filed United States v. California Interscholastic Foundation against California and its governing body for high school sports, alleging "illegal sex discrimination against female student athletes" because transgender students were allowed to play on girls’ and women’s athletic teams. The case was dismissed in late August.
New research also underscores the stakes for school meal programs. A study published this month in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that when free school meals were no longer available to all students, teachers reported that hunger and behavior problems made it harder for students to focus on learning. The findings, based on teacher interviews conducted after a pandemic-era universal school meal policy ended in June 2022, arrive as school nutrition and anti-hunger advocates worry that more students will lose access to such programs in 2026-27 because of policy changes led by the Trump administration.
A separate survey by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, found that 67% of superintendents said current funding levels are moderately or significantly hindering school meal programs. About 2 in 5 district leaders said their school system had to divert money from elsewhere in its budget to cover the cost of feeding students last year. That included tapping rainy day balances, deferring maintenance upgrades and even reducing spending on academic programs and intervention supports.