The specter of school closures is haunting Durham Public Schools. By 2030, the district could begin to close some smaller and older elementary school buildings and relocate those students to newer buildings.
The issue, according to administration, is that the district needs nearly $1 billion to deal with basic maintenance and repair needs across its 57 schools and various other holdings.
“That [$1 billion] does not even include a coat of paint. That is simply taking care of what’s broken,” director of school planning Devan Mitchell told the school board and county commission at a joint meeting on Tuesday.
Administrators have assessed that some of the district’s oldest buildings would cost more to repair than to simply demolish and rebuild, and see consolidation as an opportunity to lower that $1 billion price tag. Sixteen schools are on the district’s “watch list.”
Many are roughly 400-student elementary schools that were constructed especially close to each other as parts of the then-separate city and county school systems that merged in 1992. By consolidating students into larger elementary schools, the district could also save money on the personnel and operating costs that come with having separate buildings.
Students from schools that are closed could be relocated to existing schools in better shape, or to newly built schools. Plans are still in the draft phase, and the district likely wouldn’t break ground on any projects until the end of the decade. But the process is sure to be messy.
“Those are the least palatable conversations to ever have in education spaces,” board member Natalie Beyer said about school closures at the meeting. “Those are going to be nearly impossible conversations for this board, and future boards, to wrestle with on behalf of families and the community impact.”
One need only look back to 2024 to see the tension that Beyer is forecasting—community members were outraged over the decision to close the downtown Durham School of the Arts campus, and that’s despite the district’s breaking ground on a $250 million campus to replace it. In nearby Chapel Hill-Carrboro, which is also looking at closing schools, the school board tried to broach the conversation early, but parents were still shocked and dismayed when plans became more tangible and they learned that their own child’s school could be at risk.
The conversation is kicking off during an already tense time for the district (see: a school board election that threw out the incumbent chairwoman, a mounting workers’ union push for pay raises to match city and county wages, and, of course, “Anthony”-gate)
The schools up for closure are on the watch list due to condition, not lack of students. Recent declines in enrollment mean that the school certainly isn’t considering any expansion projects, though the corresponding dip in per-pupil funding isn’t helping the district foot the maintenance bill. On Tuesday, board member Jessica Carda-Auten pointed out that having students “in classrooms that are over 80 degrees or at 55 degrees,” referring to stories about malfunctioning climate control systems, is probably not helping to attract new students to fix that enrollment crisis.
At the top of the administration’s watch list is the 1950s Club Boulevard Elementary, which has been the subject of a consistent drip of news about failing HVAC systems and children and staff sitting in too hot or too cold temperatures.
The early draft of the plan, which includes Club Elementary, reads a bit like that old rivercrossing riddle with a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain.
In one option, the district could close and demolish both Club Elementary and George Watts Elementary School (both of which have about 400 students and are only 1.5 miles apart), and move those students to a new school on the Durham School of the Arts downtown site, which will be vacant once the district finishes construction on the new Durham School of the Arts site north of downtown. In another example, the district could demolish YE Smith Elementary and move those 400 students to Eastway Elementary, which would require new construction to house them.
Superintendent Anthony Lewis didn’t explicitly say that this impending maintenance crisis is a result of past poor management. But he noted that the district has historically been “reactive,” rather than “proactive,” in operating. If the lifespan of an HVAC is 7-10 years, Lewis said, then it shouldn’t come as a surprise to the district when a school that got a new HVAC 7-10 years ago now needs another new one.
The DPS repair list is not just a DPS problem. Under North Carolina law, the county is responsible for local school buildings and Durham County funds a whole slew of other school services. About a quarter of the county’s $1 billion budget went to DPS’s operating budget last year, with an additional $61 million going to service debt related to the schools.
In the joint schools-county meeting on Tuesday, school board members seemed ready to push for a general obligation bond for this November’s ballot. Under a general obligation bond, the county asks for voter approval to raise taxes as necessary to take on the debt for a project. Durham, in 2022, approved a $425 million bond referendum that was supposed to pay for a whole list of projects, including improvements at Club Elementary, but the higher priority Durham School of the Arts and Murray-Massenburg Elementary School ate through those funds.
“We can’t continue to defer maintenance,” Beyer said, urging county manager Claudia Hager to move ahead with a bond so that buildings “don’t fall down around” students.
Hager gently pushed back, noting that the county was “not ready for a bond” because not enough projects are “shovel ready” with designs and the proper approvals. She said the county is exploring other options, like limited obligation bonds, which do not require voter approval. The county commissioners will need to decide by July if they want to place a bond referendum on the November ballot.
“We all know the importance of addressing these pent up needs,” said Hager. “And we will do our part to help us get there in a way that’s affordable, in a way that we know that we can get across all the finish lines when it comes to actually getting approved for those things.”
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