Sara Karlin surveyed her classroom. It was her first day at a new school and, despite a frantic weekend of setting up, she thought it looked pretty good. That is as long as nobody peeked under the tablecloths she’d used to hide the empty boxes and unused furniture. 

In a way, it was “like a metaphor for the whole thing,” she said. 

Karlin was among the educators and students upended by Chicago’s decision to close 50 public schools in 2013. Before retiring in 2019, she spent nearly two decades teaching special education students on the city’s West Side. She remembers that year of transition as one of the most difficult of her career. 

Before Chicago’s school board voted to close Karlin’s school along with 49 others, the district made its case for the closures in terms that might sound familiar to Clevelanders: It was wrong for kids to attend underenrolled schools that lacked programs and resources, and the only way the district could provide kids with what they deserved was by consolidating students into larger schools. 

In both cities, leaders framed the closures not solely as decisions where empty buildings and tight budgets forced their hands but also about creating a “brighter future” for kids. They acknowledged the closures would be emotionally difficult but worthwhile, they argued, because of the academic gains. 

And, in both cities, parents, teachers and students were skeptical. 

In Cleveland, parents have expressed fears that transportation wouldn’t be nearly as seamless as assured and that consolidated schools might be overcrowded and unsafe next year. In Chicago, teachers expressed trepidation that students receiving special education services or experiencing homelessness would get lost in the shuffle and the belief that the district’s decision making was fundamentally flawed. 

Then there was also the — almost inevitable — disruption caused by closing so many schools, preparing so many classrooms and transitioning so many students at once. In Chicago, that’s where even some of the decisionmakers, people who stand by their votes to this day, think the district went wrong. Data tracked by researchers and journalists also shows that despite the emotional ups and downs, the academic results of Chicago’s closures were, in the end, kind of a wash. 

Cleveland has more time than Chicago did to get the upcoming transition right. In Chicago the school board made their final decision in May, leaving a scant few months to figure everything out. But, as Cleveland CEO Warren Morgan has said, Cleveland, relative to its size, is closing more schools than Chicago did at the time.   

“When Chicago closed 50 schools, compared to the number of schools it had at the time, it was only 10%,” said Morgan, who served as a principal at a Chicago high school during the closures. “The work that we’re doing through Building Brighter Futures — taking on 29 — I want you guys to know that’s pretty transformational and it’s tough.” 

‘Overwhelming for a system’: What it means to close 50 schools in one year 

Carlos Azcoitia served on Chicago’s school board from late 2012 until June 2015. He and six other board members voted for the closings — though he did vote against a few of the closings due to concerns about distance to the new school. To this day, he believes his decision was the right one because, at the time, Chicago faced a nearly $1 billion budget deficit. 

But he also thinks that closing so many schools at once led to transitions that were rushed and the district was not always cognizant of the specific needs and history of a school community. 

“I would not do so many schools at the same time,” he told Signal Cleveland. “I would do maybe 15, and then see, work on that transition. I would do that, because I think it could be overwhelming for a system.” 

It also wasn’t only the 50 schools that closed where students and teachers were radically impacted. The schools students moved into often had to be entirely rearranged to make room for additional classrooms as well as new students and teachers. 

When they presented the plan, Chicago school leaders promised not only that kids would do better but also said they had a plan to ease the transitions. The district guaranteed yellow school-bus transportation to schools over a mile apart and drastically expanded its safe passage programs. Principals were instructed to draft detailed transition documents complete with a calendar of activities to help build the culture of new schools. 

But parents, students and teachers still experienced the consequences of an overwhelmed system. They described to Signal Cleveland a transition year that was defined by overcrowded classrooms, tensions between staff and students and feelings of confusion and anger. 

And in the years that followed the closures, local news outlets in Chicago documented that the district lost track of some students and failed to sustain extra resources over time. Researchers from the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research,  which conducted a number of studies on the closures, also found that academic improvements only materialized for the slim sliver of students who attended top-performing schools while at the same time many students fell behind due to the upheaval of the closures and transitions. 

Cleveland school leaders have also made guarantees around transportation and safety — though reporting by Signal Cleveland has found the district hasn’t yet secured funding for all the promised programs. They’ve also produced a transition playbook intended to help create a positive climate at merging schools. 

In Chicago, the most successful transition supports such as the safe passage program were also among the most expensive. Others like yellow school-bus transportation faded fast, and teachers and principals said written plans they were asked to develop didn’t account for the messy work of building an integrated and welcoming school culture. 

‘There was a lot of confusion’: What the first year at new schools felt like 

Karlin loved teaching special education students at Lafayette Elementary in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. The school was a tight-knit community where everyone knew each other. 

When CPS put Lafayette on the list of schools that were “underutilized,” Karlin felt like the district’s formula excluded much of the learning going on at the school. 

Lafayette Elementary didn’t feel underutilized. The district was correct that the school didn’t have 30 students in every classroom, Karlin said. But it had an occupational therapy room, a speech lab and a stellar music program that needed rehearsal rooms for kids to practice their instruments. 

“We made use of the space,” Karlin said. “But that was just completely overlooked because they were thinking in terms of square footage.” 

When students and teachers arrived the following school year at Chopin Elementary, their designated welcoming school, Karlin felt as though they were crammed in. Occupational therapists and school psychologists now had to set up their offices in broom closets, and there was nowhere for children to get individual special education testing. (Ahead of Cleveland’s decision, school psychologists told board members in public meetings they worried that this scenario would be their reality next year.)

Part of the issue was that the formula used by the district was based on the contractual class size limit of 30 kids per classroom. This formula, intended to maximize efficiency, didn’t always account for empty classrooms that were used to benefit students in other ways. 

It also meant at some consolidated schools students felt overcrowded. That was the case at Mollison Elementary. Before the closures, Tricey Robinson’s two daughters attended Overton Elementary, the same neighborhood school she attended as a kid. 

The next year, at Mollison, she remembers, her youngest daughter came home and told her she’d been eating lunch in the hallway. 

Layered on top of the feeling of being crunched for space was also the sense the district was crunched for time and, as a result, things fell through the cracks. Teachers didn’t receive classroom assignments until far too late. Student records weren’t transferred correctly. Classroom books and music equipment were lost. 

Karlin’s classroom, for example, wasn’t assigned until a few days before the first day of school. Which meant, after months of being unsure if she’d follow the rest of Lafayette’s staff and students to Chopin, she had to spend her Labor Day Weekend rushing to Ikea for furniture and then frantically setting up her classroom. 

Over the next few school years, the students spread out a bit throughout the district and enrollment at Choppin began to even out, but Karlin still remembers it as a rough year. 

“There was a lot of confusion. There was a lot of misinformation. There were a lot of last-minute decisions. There was a lot of anger,” she said. 

She, along with other teachers, also felt like “there wasn’t a whole lot of learning going on that first year” because of the crowded hallways, confused teachers and anxious students. The years of data collected by researchers validates those feelings. 

There were some lucky students: Those who went to very high performing schools did experience academic gains. But that was only about a fifth of the kids impacted by closures. The rest experienced a dip in test scores for some starting the year the announcement happened and for others, the first year of the transition.

For most students, learning did rebound over time, and, in the long term, a data analysis by the local news outlet WBEZ found students at closed schools graduated high school at rates that were far below district averages — though in line with comparison schools. 

Still, there are kids who fell through the cracks. Robinson’s daughter is one of them.   

For her, the consequences of small details that were overlooked during the transition reverberated far past the first few years after the closures. In her final few months at Overton, Robinson’s older daughter was diagnosed with a learning disability and received an IEP or individualized education plan. The next year, when she arrived at Mollison, Robinson found her IEP hadn’t been transferred with her. 

“I pray that any child that went through what my baby went through, the parents have something on paper,” she said. “Because I didn’t.”

She went back and forth with the school for months while she watched her daughter fall further and further behind. The consequences of so much learning loss would follow her far beyond Mollison. 

“My daughter didn’t graduate from high school because she was so far behind,” Robinson said. “She wasn’t confident enough to sit in the class with these kids that were on track. All because they closed her school.” 

‘Welcoming schools’ weren’t as welcoming as promised

The fundamental principle of Chicago’s closures, like in Cleveland, was that students and teachers would be kept together, by as a group, transitioning to a single assigned school, known as a “welcoming school.” 

“It’s also an opportunity for the two schools to really think about their cultures, their identities, how they come together,” Morgan told Signal Cleveland when asked about what it means to be a welcoming school. 

In Chicago, district leaders tried to integrate school communities by having principals draft transition plans complete with lists of “cultural integration activities.” 

But teachers told Signal Cleveland that—despite these efforts by the district—it still felt like there were rifts and rivalries between staff from the closing and welcoming schools. 

Part of that was a side effect of the district’s process which involved announcing an initial list of closures that included 330 schools in the fall of 2013. It slowly whittled this list down with community meetings before having independent hearing officers, mostly retired judges, evaluate the final list of mergers. 

In many cases welcoming schools weren’t really that much different from closed schools—they shared problems with enrollment decline and low performance—and many welcoming schools were initially on the closure list. Meaning that when it came to the mergers there was often a distinct feeling of winners and losers between students and staff at welcoming schools and at closing schools. 

Tammie Vinson, who taught at a school that closed, was one of the teachers that felt unwelcome at her new school. At the welcoming school her principal set a tone that excluded the new teachers, like Vinson, from faculty leadership roles. 

And the principal’s attitude trickled down.

“They considered our kids the bad kids, and that translated into, you know, an environment that was not welcoming at all,” Vinson said. “And still it’s not extremely welcoming to the day.” 

Teachers said that factors like school leadership made a big difference in setting a school’s culture and tone as different schools merged. 

Karlin, for example, remembers that even with some hostility from the teachers at Chopin during her first year, her principal made an effort to bring everyone together. 

“By the end of the first year, I think he did a lot to pull us together,” Karlin said. “And really by the time I retired, it seemed to me like we had a good community, but it took a while.”

Researchers at UChicago, like Marisa de la Torre, who helped conduct a wide-ranging study that interviewed dozens of students and staff from the closed and welcoming schools found the experience of feeling unwelcome wasn’t unique in that first year. 

They attributed it, in part, to administrators who lacked training on how to merge two disparate school communities. Principals were told to make written plans but they weren’t always able to put them into practice. 

“For example, when they were in meetings and they saw these two groups of teachers sitting far away, they didn’t know how to bring them together,” De la Torre said. 

Where are welcoming schools now? 

Today, Mollison feels like a family, said Linda Thomas. She taught at Overton until it closed and has since spent 13 years teaching kindergarteners at Mollison. 

The first year was a “horrible” one. She felt like a “stepchild” but after three years things started to get better. “It was like merging a blended family, you know,” she said. “You had to get used to each other.” 

Mollison might feel like a family today, but by many metrics it is also struggling.  

When it absorbed students from Overton, Mollison grew from 233 to 498 students. It also gained extra funding. That funding slowly eroded over the next few years—two years after the closure the school’s budget was already hit with a nearly $300,000 funding decrease. Enrollment, along with funding, also began to steadily decline. 

Today, Mollison has an enrollment of only 234 students and it ranks in the bottom 5% of elementary schools statewide. In other words, it fits the exact profile of the schools closed in 2013. 

Once again, Chicago Public Schools faces a precarious budget. This time the deficit is nearly $520 million coupled with a whopping $9.3 billion in long-term debt. District-wide enrollment has fallen by nearly 87,237 students since 2013—a much steeper decline than the drop between 2000 and 2013. There are at least 150 schools city wide that are half-empty. 

And, at the end of next school year, the district’s moratorium on school closures ends. Thomas, for her part, is not sure the district would close Mollison. 

“I don’t think they would do it as dramatically as they did in 2013,” she said. “But I think, you know, they would close one or two schools.”