Atlanta — Across the Atlanta metro, dozens of schools could soon close as districts face declining enrollment.
Channel 2’s Michael Doudna reviewed trends across districts and found declining enrollments are changing how school boards consider which buildings to keep open.
For many families, a school is more than just a building.
“The school is everything,” said Dunwoody parent Yang Yang. “It’s why we moved to Dunwoody.”
She and other Dunwoody parents are working to convince DeKalb County School District to keep Vanderlyn Elementary School open next year.
The school was one of over two dozen up for closure when the district announced redistricting plans earlier this year.
“It’s an anchor for the community,” Tarun Pawar said. “My kindergartner loves it here. She feels part of the community here.”
Across the district, more than nine thousand parents gave feedback on the school district’s proposal to close up to 27 buildings.
For parents like Yang and Pawar, the school is a foundation for the community and for a child’s educational career.
But nationwide, rising costs and declining enrollments are forcing districts to make tough decisions
“When I go to superintendent conferences across the country, we’re all grappling with the same issues,” said Fulton County Schools superintendent Mike Looney.
So what happened?
Looney remembers that years ago, populations in the metro counties were growing, and with that came higher enrollment.
From 1996 to 2016, Fulton County built 32 elementary schools.
Since then, they have closed 8 schools, including Parklane Elementary School and Spalding Drive Elementary School last year. And closures won’t stop there. Looney met with Channel 2’s Michael Doudna in the library of Bethune Elementary School, which could be closed next fall.
Even if it survives, the district said students attending there today will be in a new building this fall; it’s part of the district’s work to repurpose buildings and adapt to a changing enrollment landscape.
“The number of students that are entering kindergarten is much, much smaller than the number of seniors that we have graduating high school,” Looney said.
Channel 2 Action News looked at Georgia Department of Education and the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement data to see how that new reality changes the cost a school pays for each student it serves.
Statewide, the cost per student is up more than 60 percent of the past 10 years.
In Atlanta, that cost is up 77 percent; in DeKalb County, they are spending 91 percent more.
Looney says there’s no easy solution to the numbers problem that poses to districts.
“It adds up very, very quickly,” Looney said. “You talk about million of dollars every year of additional expenses or savings.”
To combat that, districts are turning to consolidation.
“One principle, one lunchroom staff — we’re creating efficiencies,” Looney said.
To do this, districts target schools that have low enrollment or that are expensive to maintain. But district leaders often don’t consider educational performance when making those decisions.
Looney says that there are more important factors than the physical building that contribute to a student’s performance.
“The building isn’t what’s magic,” Looney said. “It’s the students and the families that make the school magic, along with the staff members in the school.”
But families who moved to areas because of a school’s strong educational record say they wish it played a bigger role in the decision.
“It’s very frustrating to think that the education piece is not really a factor, right?” Yang said.
Yang and others pushing to keep their neighborhood schools open in DeKalb County feel like the decision-making process is flawed, that educational performance should play a role and that closing a dozens of schools at once creates unnecessary shock to the system.
“Why are we running with this plan?” said Rebecca Howard, another parent opposed to Vanderlyn Elementary closing. “Seems like maybe we need to rethink the plan.”
DeKalb says that to handle a growing number of empty seats, these closures are needed to offer everything from sports to AP classes.
Parents worry the decisions will hurt students and the system.
“Really make sure that they’re making the best choice, not only fiscally, but also for the students,” Yang said.
Some state lawmakers share parents’ concerns. State Senator Sally Harrell wrote to DeKalb County Schools superintendent Norman Sauce to ask about the redistricting process.
In a reply, Sauce told senator Harrell that the district is still collecting data and that no final decisions have been made yet. The district is expected to update their previous plan on Tuesday, May 5.
Fulton County Schools tells us that they expect more closures as enrollment is expected to fall further in the next few years.
In December 2025, the Atlanta Public Schools Board of Education voted unanimously to accept a plan impacting 16 schools, with more than a dozen facilities closing starting in Fall 2027.
The redistricting struggles facing DeKalb and Fulton could be on the horizon in other metro counties soon as population trends continue. Clayton County indicated school closures are expected but hasn’t announced specific plans yet.
Further outside the core of the Atlanta metro, populations are more stable, and in some cases, they’re still growing.
Cobb County Schools and Gwinnett County Schools don’t have closure plans for this year, though Gwinnett County faces redistricting in the years ahead.
Earlier this month, Forsyth County continued a moratorium on new residential building through October 2026 in an effort to ease overcrowding in schools. The measure could help the county avoid the boom-bust population trends that hit Fulton and DeKalb counties.
Whether enrollments rise or fall, Looney said the decisions that get made need to balance educational needs with a district’s responsibility to tax payers.
“If money were not an issue, if tax revenue was not an issue, sure, we could continue to operate the schools,” Looney said. “But that’s not the reality. That wouldn’t a good stewardship of the dollars that we’re blessed with receiving.”
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