What to Do When Your Neighborhood Public School Is Closing to Cover District Admin Building Cost Overruns
The folding chair under me stuck to the back of my jeans when I stood up halfway through last Tuesday’s school board meeting. My 8-year-old Lila had spent the whole hour coloring on the back of a printed budget spreadsheet, her sparkly purple marker bleeding through to the line item for the district’s new $14 million administrative building, and I’d just heard the superintendent confirm our neighborhood elementary, Maplewood K-5, is on the closure list for next fall.
I’d showed up expecting a routine vote on new playground mulch, the thing our PTA had spent three months raising money to buy. Half the parents in the room were still in work scrubs or construction boots, sipping gas station coffee we’d grabbed on the way over. Then the budget director pulled up his slide deck: $2.1 million in unplanned costs for the district office renovation, approved by the board 18 months prior, and the lowest-impact way to plug the gap, he claimed, was to shutter Maplewood and bus our 220 kids 20 minutes across town to the larger elementary on the other side of the highway.
After the meeting adjourned, a dozen of us clustered by the gym doors, still staring at the printed handouts. Jake, whose son is in Lila’s third grade class, runs a small residential construction company and bid on the admin building job back in 2021. He pulled his bid before breaking ground, he said, because district leaders kept adding last-minute upgrades voters never signed off on: marble countertops for the boardroom, a custom built-in coffee bar for admin staff, a paved VIP parking lot that required re-routing a storm drain. The final price tag came in 23% over the original bond amount, sold to voters in 2020 as a project that would never pull money from classroom budgets.
Lila was half-asleep in the backseat on the drive home, clutching her crumpled marker-covered spreadsheet, when she mumbled, “Does this mean I can’t walk to school with Mia anymore?” Mia lives two blocks over, and the two have walked the three blocks to Maplewood together every morning since kindergarten, stopping without fail to check the squirrel nest in the big oak tree at the end of my block. I didn’t have a good answer right then. I just said we’d talk in the morning, then stayed up until 11 reading old district reports and parent accounts of similar school closures, and what I found didn’t ease the tightness in my chest.
People who haven’t spent much time around young kids often write off attachment to a neighborhood school as silly sentiment. It’s just a building, they say. Kids make new friends. But I remembered when Lila’s daycare closed suddenly when she was 4, with two weeks notice. She had stomach aches every Sunday night for three weeks, refused to eat snack at the new center because she didn’t know which bin held the plain goldfish she liked, got sent to the quiet corner twice for pushing kids who got too close to her assigned cubby. For kids 5 to 11, school isn’t just reading groups and math worksheets. It’s a stack of small, predictable things: the custodian who slips you an extra sticker on your birthday, the teacher who keeps an extra inhaler for your asthma by her desk, the spot by the window where you hang your rain boots, the after-school program that lets you color until your mom gets off her hospital shift. When that gets pulled out with three months notice, it doesn’t just feel sad. It shows up in behavior, attendance, and academic progress for years afterward.
Lila’s teacher Ms. Henderson has 22 years in the district, and she was teaching at Lincoln Elementary when it closed back in 2019. She told me over lukewarm coffee after drop-off last week that reading proficiency scores for displaced third graders dropped 17% that first year at the combined school, and chronic absenteeism jumped 28%. It wasn’t that the new teachers were unskilled, or the kids couldn’t keep up. Bus routes ran 10 to 15 minutes late at least twice a week, so kids missed the first 20 minutes of reading block. Parents without cars couldn’t make it to after-school tutoring or parent-teacher conferences, because the cross-town activity bus only ran at 3 and 5 p.m. Half the low-income kids who walked to school for free breakfast ended up skipping it entirely if the bus was late, because they didn’t want to walk into class late and draw attention to themselves.
We didn’t organize a giant rally or hire a lawyer the first week, because none of us have that kind of time or extra cash. Three of us sat around my kitchen table last Saturday, ate cold pepperoni pizza, and filed a free public records request through the state department of education website. We asked for every change order for the admin building approved after 2021, every record of budget transfers from the classroom operating fund to the capital construction budget, and all enrollment projections the district used to justify closing Maplewood. It took 20 minutes total, no legal degree required. Most states have these forms available for free to any resident, and districts are required by law to turn over documents within 30 days. We already got a tip from a former admin assistant that the district transferred $1.4 million out of the school maintenance fund to cover overruns last fall, money that was supposed to pay for new HVAC units at three elementaries, including ours.
We’re also trying not to let the uncertainty take over regular life, for the kids’ sake. I never tell Lila “don’t worry, everything will be fine” because I don’t know that for sure, and empty promises just make kids more anxious when they overhear us talking after bedtime. Instead, I say the same line every time she asks: “Right now, the district has suggested closing Maplewood, but grown-ups are going to share all the facts and vote before anything changes. I will tell you as soon as there’s a real answer, and no matter what, I’ll walk with you to meet Mia on the first day of school next year.” Ms. Henderson hasn’t held any big class talks about the closure, either. She just added 10 minutes of unstructured free play to the start of every school day, and put out extra bins of blocks and crayons instead of jumping straight into morning work. When kids feel like they have no control over big adult decisions, small, predictable choices – what to draw, who to play with, when to get a drink of water – make a bigger difference than any assembly about being brave.
Last weekend we set up a folding table outside the grocery store down the street, sold chocolate chip cookies for a dollar apiece and collected signatures to delay the vote until full budget documents are public. The owner of the donut shop next door dropped off a free dozen glazed, said he went to Maplewood in 1992. A retired first grade teacher who worked there for 30 years stayed for an hour with her old class photo albums. We got 217 signatures that day, and more than half the people who signed didn’t have kids in the district. They walk their dogs past the playground after school, coach t-ball on the field behind the building, remember going to kindergarten there themselves.
The school board vote is six weeks away. Two of seven board members have already publicly said they won’t vote to close Maplewood, and the local paper ran a front-page story about the admin building overruns last Sunday. We’re organizing a group of alumni and local business owners to speak at the next meeting, not to yell about wasted money, but to talk about the specific, unglamorous good the school makes possible: the free food pantry by the front office, the no-fee after-school STEM club, the crossing guard who knows every kid by name. It’s not a sure thing. Last night Lila taped a drawing of the class’s new butterfly garden to the fridge, planted just last month. She said she’s going to leave it up until they release the painted lady butterflies in May. I taped the petition flyer right next to it.
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