Peluso then recommended that the Rochester school district close eleven of its forty-five schools at the end of the school year. Kpor, who was watching the meeting online, was taken aback. Five buildings would be shuttered altogether; the other six would be put to use by other schools in the district.
School 10 was among the second group. The school would cease to exist, and its building, with its new gymnasium-auditorium and its light-filled two-story atrium, would be turned over to a public Montessori school for pre-K through sixth grade, which had been sharing space with another school.
Kpor was stunned. The building was newly renovated. She had heard at a recent PTA meeting that its students’ over-all performance was improving. And now it was being shut down? “I was in disbelief,” she said. “It was a stab in the back.”
School closures are a fact of life in a country as dynamic as the United States. Cities boom, then bust or stagnate, leaving public infrastructure that is incommensurate with present needs. The brick elementary school where I attended kindergarten and first grade, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was closed in the early eighties, as the city’s population declined, and then was razed to make way for a shopping plaza.