Boston school committee votes to close 3 additional schools by summer 2027

The Boston School Committee voted to approve three school closures by the end of the 2026-27 school year and reconfigure grade levels in other schools at a meeting Wednesday evening.

The 6-1 vote comes a month after the district announced the proposal as part of a long-term facilities plan that aims to shrink the city’s total school building capacity due to declining enrollment in the district and underutilized school buildings.

“These are hard decisions. They never, ever get easier,” Superintendent Mary Skipper said ahead of the vote. “But I’m here making these recommendations tonight because I know that these closures … they are the right decision.”

The district will close the Lee Academy Pilot School, serving kids ages 3 through 8, in Dorchester and two high schools: Another Course to College in Hyde Park and Community Academy of Science and Health in Dorchester. Those closures will impact roughly 800 students, with the school cutting off any new student enrollment starting next school year.

Reasons to close these schools vary: Despite praise over its personalized instruction, Lee Academy’s building size is too small to add desired grade levels, the district said. ACC can’t “support a high quality student experience” due to no gym, auditorium or outdoor learning spaces. While CASH enrolls just half the number of students its building was designed to hold, according to the district.

Additionally, the district will remove the high school portion of K-12 Henderson Inclusion School in Dorchester and turn it into a pre-K to eighth grade school and eliminate seventh and eighth grades from Tobin School in Roxbury to make it a pre-K to sixth grade. It’s also adding sixth grade to the Russell School in Dorchester.

The district estimates a cost saving of up to roughly $20 million from the move. It’s part of an ongoing school reduction plan that started in 2023 to reduce the total number of BPS school buildings to 95 by 2030.

The district has experienced steadily declining enrollment — shrinking from more than 56,000 students in 2017 to 50,000 in 2021 to just 46,800 students this school year.

"We have too few resources spread across too many schools, making it harder to deliver on the strong student outcomes ... that this committee and our entire district want for our students and they deserve," Skipper said, adding recommendations were based on "extensive community engagement" and enrollment projections.

Yet, the proposal generated community pushback since being announced Nov. 19.

The Boston Education Justice Alliance, a citywide coalition of parents, students and teachers, urged the committee to hold off on a vote earlier this month. It said the changes will displace the city’s most vulnerable students, including English learners and students with special needs, and disproportionately impact Boston’s Black and Hispanic students.

“These closures are not just administrative decisions, they are decisions that fracture relationships, destabilize young people, and erase decades of community-built culture,” BEJA Executive Director Keondré McClay wrote in the letter signed on by more than a dozen community groups.

Community advocates also argued there was not enough time for input by impacted schools and communities.

“ There has been little to no engagement with the school communities affected, and the timeline is, you know, lightning fast,” Krista Magnuson, a BPS parent and organizer for Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance, testified Wednesday. “It's been barely more than a month since these closures and mergers were announced.”

The only no vote on the school committee came from member Rafaela Polanco Garcia, who argued the district’s plan focused only on closures without “alternative options that could be considered to avoid closures.” She also expressed worry over students hit by multiple changes since the facilities plan was first shared December 2023.

The district estimates 49 students so far have been affected by more than one merger or closure in the years since.

Other school committee members, despite voting in favor, expressed concern with the district's degree of listening to community members. Member Stephen Alkins, who said he attended meetings in some impacted school communities, sensed families' frustration.

“ If you're taking me away from my current situation, you got to give me something on the other side of it to hold onto. And I know that families did not feel that,” he said.

The district said impacted students “will be given priority in the assignment process for the 2027-2028 school year" and that impacted students with disabilities will be "matched with a strong school option" for required services.

The move will also impact roughly 200 full-time staffers. In one guidance document, the district encouraged educators affiliated with Boston Teachers Union to apply for vacant positions in the district.