At Pease Elementary in Austin, just steps from the Capitol, the grass is overgrown. The marquee is empty, and the gates of the playground are padlocked.
Pete Salazar hadn’t seen his old school in five years, but he remembered it well. He hopped over the fence and sat on the swings.
“They were really nice to me,” he recalled. “There were no bullies or anything. No one was ever mean.”
Pete saw his third grade classroom and the blacktop where he used to play. It brought back fond memories, and some painful ones, too.
“I was sad to see it again because it reminded me of all the fun times I had here,” Pete said.
Pease was permanently closed in 2020, just before Pete began fourth grade. He was too young to remember much about how he did academically in his time at Pease, but he does remember doing better in school than he does these days.
Pease, then the oldest continuously operating school in Texas, served exclusively transfer students, largely the children of parents from across Austin who worked downtown or in state office buildings.
When the school closed five years ago, Pease students were scattered to neighborhood schools across the city, losing touch with many of their former classmates.
“I was kinda sad because not all of my friends were going to the same schools as me,” Pete remembered.
Noelita Lugo, Pete’s mother and a former Austin Independent School District trustee, teared up watching her eldest son play in the overgrown grass of his old elementary school.
“Oh my gosh, when I saw Pete go to the swings, and he was swinging, I wanted to cry,” she said, wearing a shirt with the school’s purple bobcat mascot.
After the closure, Pete had been able to make new friends and find his place socially, Lugo thinks, but she still wonders whether he might have had different academic outcomes had he been able to stay at Pease.
“Academically, I don’t know what could have happened,” Lugo said. “I don’t know what it could have been like had we been able to stay physically connected with other families and watch our kids grow up in elementary school together. Maybe he would have had a different trajectory.”
The academic impact was made worse, she believes, by the pandemic that quickly followed the announcement of the school’s closure. Pete and his Pease classmates were disconnected twice over: disconnected from the classroom by the pandemic and disconnected from their classmates by the closing of Pease.
How to close a school
For all the talk about school closures in Texas, there has been little conversation about their impact on students, even as districts from San Antonio to Fort Worth plan to close dozens of campuses.
Jeonghyeok Kim, an economist in the PhD program at the University of Houston, has analyzed data from across Texas to study the long-term impact of closures. While previous studies focus on short-term impacts, Kim’s analysis follows students’ academic and economic outcomes well into their twenties.
“What I find is that there is a long-term negative impact on their educational and labor market outcomes,” Kim said. “For instance, I find a decline in high school graduation rates, college attendance, and college attainment, and also college quality, and also their earnings and employment rates.”
To control for other factors, Kim’s study compared outcomes for students who experienced school closures with recent graduates of the same schools before they closed.
It is the difficulty of an additional school transition that brings down outcomes for students whose schools close, Kim thinks. Sometimes, however, school closures are necessary.
“If we need to close down schools, then we need to close down schools.” Kim told Texas Standard. “I mean, what’s the alternative [to] closing down schools? Just let the school get smaller and smaller and smaller, and disappear? I don’t think that’s the right way we want to go.”
And that’s the dilemma: What alternative do districts have? It’s not so much whether you close schools, Kim concluded, but how.
This year, facing a nearly $20 million deficit, Austin ISD has already begun the process of identifying further schools for closure. But Superintendent Matias Segura, who led the 2019 process as operations director, says things will be different this time around.
“We know that we need to have better-resourced schools, and with the constraints that we have in our system, the only way to do that is to have fewer of them,” Segura told Texas Standard.
Segura hopes to have a final decision on which schools will close by November, so families can have more time to prepare for their student’s transition to a new school.
“The transition piece, to me, is as important,” Segura said. “And that will be incorporated as part of our plan, and then when the vote takes place in November, it gives our families a whole entire semester to transition out of the current plan they were headed on and into a new plan.”
‘Remember everything’
The research suggests the social and academic disruption of a school closure can stay with kids for a lifetime. What Austin ISD learns this time around could have ripple effects across Texas.
In the coming year, the old Pease building is set to become a child care center. For now, it stands empty, slowly fading from memory.
Pete and the many Pease graduates like him remember their time at Pease fondly, even as they move on to new beginnings and different schools. For Pete, the new school year is a fresh start, his first year of high school.
And for the thousands of kids across Texas facing the prospect of school closures this year, he has a simple message:
“You’ll be fine. Nothing too bad will happen,” Pete said. “Just make sure to remember everything.”
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