Amid Enrollment Declines, Public Schools Reckon With Potential Closures

Having concluded that no school in Mexico, public or private, could properly educate his child, who has a rare and severe speech disorder, Guillermo Cepeda set out to identify the best bilingual school in the world.

He found it in Chapel Hill, Cepeda told the members of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools board on a Thursday night last month.

The board members were slumped in their seats, drained after almost two hours of discussion about how to select which schools will be closed. 

Due to a combination of lower birth rates, higher housing costs, and more families sending their children to private and charter schools, enrollment is on the decline. State funding to the district, awarded primarily on a per-pupil basis, is falling as a result. Enrollment is down 350 students this school year alone, which will translate to about $2.6 million less in state funding next year. 

Meanwhile, the cost of maintaining multiple half-century-old buildings is mounting. Without quickly moving to close two elementary schools, somewhere between 50 and 80 employees will have to be laid off, Superintendent Rodney Trice had told the board.

It was after 9 p.m. when Cepeda, a slight man with slicked back hair wearing a Ralph Lauren button down, approached the lectern in the packed room at the district’s headquarters. He was the 30th speaker to offer his thoughts during the meeting’s public comment session. Dozens more were still on the list. 

As a professional head hunter, “I am trained to find rare gems,” Cepeda said. He reviewed schools in 15 countries, from Australia to Argentina, and decided that the very best for his son was Frank Porter Graham Elementary, a bilingual PreK-5 school in Chapel Hill.

“What I’m trying to say is FPG has a reputation globally,” he said. “So it is just a matter of promoting the school and not killing what brings you the enrollment, right?”

Districts across the state, and the country, are grappling with the same confluence of factors reducing the number of students enrolled in traditional public schools. 

By the calculations of the nonprofit North Carolina Justice Center, the pace of closures is picking up. At least seven other North Carolina districts voted to close a school in the past year; closures or mergers are under discussion in at least four others, from Beaufort County on the coastal plain to Gaston County in the Charlotte suburbs.

Leaders in metropolitan-area districts have the especially sticky challenge of making the cuts necessary to balance their budgets while maintaining and even growing the programs that appeal to the most mobile and highly educated parents. With the General Assembly incentivizing the expansion of charter schools and private schools, these parents have more alternatives to consider.

Frances Tong, a parent at Glenwood Elementary School, which hosts Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s Chinese-immersion program, summarized the results of a parent survey at the school board’s February 5th meeting: If the program ends, parents will flee.

Demography As Destiny?

Superintendent Trice has been trying to prepare the school community for change since late last summer. He laid out the district’s demographic trends in a series of community meetings.

“We are positioning ourselves to become a smaller district, and it’s time we acknowledge that publicly,” he said at the start of a November presentation at Smith Middle School. 

Trice used a battery of graphs and charts to explain how Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools arrived at this inflection point.

The line representing enrollment over the past decade looked like a lopsided mountain. From the left, it sloped moderately upward to a peak of 12,335, then dropped off abruptly amid the pandemic. It hit a plateau in 2022 and 2023, then descended rapidly again, arriving at 10,825 in the 2025-26 school year.

The district investigated where those students went. About 71% moved to another part of the state or out of the country, according to 2023-24 data. About 3% were homeschooled, 7% attended a charter school, and 16% went to a private school. 

The private schools receiving the most former Chapel Hill-Carrboro students were Durham Academy (10 students), St. Thomas More Catholic School, Carolina Friends School, and Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill. (The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, a two-year public residential high school in Durham that received 11 students, was also put in this category.)

The analysis didn’t capture the impact of the General Assembly’s expansion of the state’s private school voucher program, Opportunity Scholarships, to families of any income, which took effect the following year. But many of the state’s most elite private schools don’t participate in the program; only two of the four mentioned in the district’s analysis, St. Thomas More and Trinity, do currently.

For as much attention as the voucher program has received, it was not the dominant factor explaining Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s enrollment decline. Out-migration and a decline in the birth rate seemed to play a larger role.

While Orange County’s population has been growing, most of the growth has been among people 65 and older, Trice pointed out. The youngest group, under age 4, actually shrank from 2010 to 2020. The most recent kindergarten cohort was 28% smaller than a decade ago.

“There’s just not as many 5- to 17-year-olds living in our community anymore,” Trice said. 

He said the takeaway should not be all “doom and gloom.” There’s also an opportunity to form a new vision for the education the district provides.

“It’s not a crisis if we work together to pivot to become a smaller district, perhaps a 9,000-student district,” he said. “And there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a 9,000-student district—unless you’re funding yourself as a 12,000-student district.”

Cutting Costs

Parents of Chapel Hill-Carrboro students have gotten used to staffing levels far above most North Carolina schools.

In every one of the 11 elementary schools in the district, there is a nurse and a counselor. In every kindergarten through third grade classroom, there is a teaching assistant. There are 11.5 elementary school world-language teachers.

Few of those positions are covered by state funds. The district’s schools get more local tax funding than in any other part of the state—roughly $8,800 per student. Local parents expect to get something extraordinary in return.

In a series of meetings with overflow crowds this winter, Trice and his deputies have cautioned that if schools are not closed, those benefits will have to be peeled away.

“The DNA of what our elementary schools are is going to change significantly, just because we’re going to have to reduce the amount of resources that has made Chapel Hill what it is,” the district’s chief financial officer, Jonathan Scott, said at the February 19 meeting. 

Many parents say they see the financial need—district staff estimate that closing an elementary school would save about $1.7 million a year, including about $1.4 million in staff pay and benefits, plus utilities, maintenance, a custodial contract, and property insurance. Major spending on new roofs and HVAC systems would also be avoided. So closing two schools could take a large chunk out of the $3 million to $7 million potential deficit Scott has projected. 

It seems unlikely that Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools can expect a significant boost in funding anytime soon. The General Assembly has failed to pass a budget for this fiscal year. Some lawmakers have threatened to slash Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s funding in particular over culture war issues. Orange County commissioners are worried about raising property taxes. And the Trump administration has made drastic cuts to education spending. 

Without reducing fixed costs, the district will have no money to reinvest in a new vision, Trice and his staff have warned. They will have no money to expand pre-kindergarten programming, language programming, career and technical education, or any other community priority.

Still, no parent wants their kid’s school to close.

In a district that’s home to the state’s flagship university and a major medical complex, the board was guaranteed to receive ample feedback.

Its meandering approach to the decision has seemed to elicit even more.

Temperature Checks

On January 15, district staff recommended considering three elementary schools for closure: Ephesus, Glenwood, and Seawell. 

A 2023 evaluation of building conditions showed that as some of the district’s oldest schools, built between 1940 and 1971, they would need major investment to remain open. 

The same report found that three other elementary schools—Carrboro, Estes Hills, and FPG—had similar investment needs. But the board had already committed to replacing those schools, in that order, with the funds from a 2024 bond referendum.

Some board members argued that the bond money prioritization should not be binding. As a matter of law, it is not. The bond language committed them only to spending the money on school facilities. But other board members were loath to revisit what had already been a protracted and painful process.

Chair Riza Jenkins took a “temperature check”—an informal, nonbinding vote—that revealed the board was split 4-3, with the majority in favor of considering only the three schools. “I fear if we reopen the discussion of which elementary schools it’s just going to get quite cloudy for the community,” Jenkins said. “We’ve already been there, done that.”

But at the next meeting, the majority flipped. Four members favored studying a larger pool of schools, taking only one of the six high-needs schools out of consideration: Carrboro, because the district had already spent millions to begin the new school’s design.

Parents began to fine-tune their arguments about their schools’ indispensability and uniqueness. At the next meeting, the crowd spilled into the hallway.

Jenkins’ repeated assurance that the decision was about buildings, not programs, seemed to do little to calm fears. Parent after parent lined up to testify to their decision to relocate to Chapel Hill-Carrboro for a particular school or a particular program. 

Longtime local residents testified to the quality education the district had built its reputation on. Prospective parents shared their hopes. Several current students offered their testimony in Spanish or Mandarin. 

With parents wearing T-shirts representing their schools, the room split into color blocks.

Data Driven, But Decisive

The escalating division prompted four PTA leaders to give a joint statement at the board’s March 5 meeting: “We all love our school communities, and of course, do not want them to close. We are speaking together tonight to show that we are also a larger community.”

The representatives of Ephesus, Estes Hills, FPG, and Glenwood asked the board to stick to the timeline district staff had proposed, with a decision by the end of this school year.

“We know this is a financial decision—none of our schools are failing, and each is so special for its own reasons. Please use financially grounded data and criteria that align with the financial strain on the district as a large community. This will help us to support the decision and move forward together in good faith.”

The board had debated 64 potential criteria for selecting the one or two schools to be closed. To move forward, it needed to take a formal vote authorizing district staff to prepare a state-mandated “study” of each possibly closed school.

Board member Barbara Fedders proposed including only the three schools named as candidates for closure in January. 

Unraveling the bond plan “introduces instability and uncertainty” and complicates construction logistics, she said. “I think we as a board need to be data driven, but we also need to be decisive.”

Board member Rani Dasi recapped her arguments for expanding the pool of closure candidates. “The capital improvement plan also made commitments to Ephesus, Glenwood, and Seawell,” she said. “And if our objective is to maximize financial benefits, why would we as a board limit the options that we can even consider that are available to us?”

The decisive vote came from Meredith Ballew, who had been in both camps over the course of the debate. “I know that this process has been deeply hurtful,” she said, reading a prepared statement. Her voice wavered. “These schools are not just buildings. They are all communities with long histories and deep relationships.”

She ultimately favored limiting the candidates to the three on the original list: Ephesus, Glenwood, and Seawell.

“During our bond discussions, we engaged in a robust process that considered facility condition, long-range capital planning, and fiscal sustainability,” she said. “I believe that those factors remain relevant here. If we move away from those principles without clear justification, we risk undermining both public trust and long-term stability.”

Board members settled on the criteria to be included in the report, noting that they still had a final vote ahead of them, likely in June, based on updated demographic projections, followed by a process to determine new enrollment zones, affecting every last school.

The once-boisterous crowd listened in stunned silence.