School districts across Texas are closing campuses, or considering doing so, as financial pressures mount.
Austin ISD recently announced it would close 13 campuses next year. Fort Worth ISD is moving forward with a plan to close 18 schools over the next five years.
These announcements are often met with a mix of anger and heartbreak, and in some cases a sense of helplessness.
Chloe Young, who covers education for Community Impact in Austin, said AISD plans to shut down 11 elementary schools and two middle schools.
“It’s important to note that seven of these campuses have received three consecutive F ratings from the Texas Education Agency and require some form of state-mandated intervention,” she said. “So the district is proposing to close those campuses, but might still need to provide intervention for those students wherever the majority of them are reassigned to.”
This could look like adding additional staff at campuses or giving teachers more coaching, Young said.
“Three of the proposed school closures are at wall-to-wall dual language campuses. So those are schools where all students are taught in both English and Spanish,” she said. “The district said they wanted to move the wall-to-wall dual language programming to areas where more emergent bilingual students reside.
These schools are meant to serve 50% emergent bilingual and 50% nonemergent bilingual, but right now they’re enrolling mostly English-proficient students. They’re going to repurpose current campuses to provide that programming.”
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The San Antonio area also had a number of school closures recently. Camille Phillips, who covers education for Texas Public Radio, said the San Antonio school district closed schools in May 2024.
“Four different schools closed at the end of last school year in the San Antonio area from two different school districts,” Phillips said. “So we’ve had like five different districts over the last three years that have closed schools.”
Phillips said that kids and families who attend shuttered schools experience a big upheaval.
“San Antonio ISD made a big deal about trying to bring the community along and involve them in the process, but people will still be unhappy if their school closes,” she said.
“They lost about a thousand students after they closed those schools at San Antonio ISD. But it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing. Enrollment was already declining. But I do think you do see some families decide to to leave because they don’t want another upheaval. ‘What if my school closes again?’”
Families who decide to leave public school might choose a private option, a charter school, or might decide to home school.
In Austin, Young said school closures will impact more students than just those at shuttering campuses.
“Even for the students that aren’t in a school that are closing, they could still be impacted by this process,” she said. “There are some schools where they’re being repurposed to provide a certain program. And the current students going there are going to be rezoned to another school.
The district has said that they are rezoning pretty much all campuses. So many students are going to be at a new campus next year, having a different commute, seeing new faces.”
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Young said she sees two main factors causing this spate of school closures: public school funding and enrollment.
“Districts had been asking for more funding since 2019. A lot of districts adopted deficit budgets the past two years. And the state did raise public ed funding by $8.4 billion in 2025. But I know some organizations like Raise Your Hand Texas have said that this was well short of what districts needed to keep up with inflation,” she said.
“And then alongside that, Austin ISD, for example, has said their enrollment has declined significantly over the last 10 years and is projected to drop another eleven percent over the next 10 years.”
This is significant because in Texas, school funding is tied to enrollment and attendance.
“You have districts that maybe once experienced fast-enrollment growth, were building lots of campuses, and now they’re seeing that enrollment flattened,” Young said. “Maybe their revenue is not keeping up with the expenses that they have.”
