Broward Schools holds community discussions over future of under-enrolled schools

Broward County Public Schools has been weighing the decision to close or repurpose several under-enrolled schools for more than a year. And the district is looking to move the conversation forward by getting input from the community. 

The first of eight meetings to be held all over the county was underway Monday night at Dillard High School. And perhaps unlike the town halls held last school year on the same topic, the school district thinks these meetings will really be a chance for the public to have their say and to be heard. 

“We hope that the community provides some ideas that we haven’t thought about,” Superintendent Dr. Howard Hepburn said. 

The format was designed to get people talking to each other, with parents, grandparents, teachers and concerned citizens seated at round tables instead of auditorium seats.

“I feel that instead of closing those schools, they should find a way to try and work with those schools to see what they need,” parent Tameko Cuttino shared. 

“The trend is that usually your property value goes down [if a school is closed],” grandparent Windsor Ferguson said. 

It’s always tough to close a school, or to make drastic changes to an established school, so Howard said the district will rely on input from parents. 

“This time we’re coming out, it’s pretty much unstructured, right? We want to go out to the community, have some real dialogue, back and forth, really engage with the community, really hear their thoughts and ideas about this process that ultimately affects their neighborhood,” he said. 

Hepburn said the district is still operating on the mandate from the school board to close at least five schools in response to declining enrollment. 

While he said there’s no list of potential targets for redefining, the 11 schools discussed at Tuesday's school board workshop meeting included: 

For potential repurposing: 

• Broward Estates Elementary Schools
• North Fork Elementary Schools
• Silver Lakes Elementary Schools
• Silver Shores Elementary Schools
• Olsen Middle School

For potential grade reconfiguration:

• Coconut Creek Elementary Schools
• Hollywood Central Elementary School
• Thurgood Marshall Elementary School
• Pines Middle School 

When asked if it was better for students to be sent to a school with more kids rather than a school that was very under-enrolled, Hepburn replied: “It’s better to send kids [to a school] with the right amount of resources, the best opportunities possible, because when you repurpose a school and you consolidate students, you can leverage better opportunities because there’s more funding going to that school now.”

“In a small school, we spend more money on operating the school than we do on leveraging opportunities for instructional purposes,” he continued. 

So, the more students are enrolled in a school, the more money goes to actual instruction.

The school board members and superintendent pledged not to make any decisions on school closures until all of the public comments were in and analyzed by district staff.