School Closure Merging

By Biruk Meyer, ’26

(This essay was originally published in the Spring 2025 issue of Dragon Tales.)

The 2025-26 school year will see the planned shutdown of four BPS schools Excel High School (South Boston), Community Academy in JP, the Mary Lyon Pilot High School in Allston/Brighton, and the Dever Elementary School located in Dorchester. According to Boston Indicators: the number of enrolled students in BPS has decreased every decade for the last 80 years. While the enrollment numbers seems to have stabilized between 2000 to 2019 the pandemic seemed to send the trend continuing downward by several thousand enrolled students (Ciurczak 2024). The most logical decision seems to downsize the school system to be able to funnel time, money, and resources into few places at a time but that does not mean that the decision will be implemented smoothly.

Along with the shutdowns there are plans to merge schools together such as the plan to merge Winthrop and Clap elementary with the Frederick Middle School. NBC Boston writes that the decision to dissolve the Dever school and merge it with Frederick Middle School has left many  people who have connections to the school understandably upset as they feel that the community and neighborhood will not feel the same with the lack of school in the area (Palumbo 2025). Issues of getting kids to and from school are another major reason that many people feel that the school shutdowns and merging will negatively affect them. Parents and children will need to reevaluate how to get to and from school as well as bus pick up times changing the schedules that families already have in place when it comes to sports and other activities. 

The school shutdowns could have longer term effects on the areas where they were originally located. Such as neighborhoods becoming less attractive to families with young children, this could lead to shifts in community characteristics, especially the overall age of neighborhoods and perceptions of areas as to whether they are considered intended for families are not. As schools close or move, social bonds can weaken due to increased travel distances and the loss of school-based events that once brought people together. Students might feel more disconnected from their community where they live as they commute further to other neighborhoods to attend school.

NBC writes that these school shutdowns and merges will affect about 1,300 students, disproportionately affecting multilingual students (Palumbo 2025). The plan must account for this and hopefully provide resources in order for these students to continue thriving in whatever environment they are in. While this plan was put in place in order to address the shrinking enrollment and the ineffective distribution of resources the school district still needs to be intentional about not focusing on funding and focusing on large wealthy schools over smaller schools in lower income neighborhoods otherwise the issue of inequality will not change at all. For this plan to have a positive impact on communities and the city as a whole the underlying issues of inequality need to be tackled while using this reshaping of the school system as a way to reset the current trend that the school system is following, and re-evaluate the plan for the future a future with fewer students in BPS.