Shutting it Down!: School closure impact on local community

          When I was 16, as a junior in high school, my school closed. My classmates and I were forced to spend our last year of high school as newbies in completely different schools after the high school component of our K-12 private school closed its doors. We would not go to prom together. The reputations we had built in clubs and other extracurricular activities would never foster a run for student body president. We would never decide whether or not to go to college, which college to go to or learn how to get financial aid as group. We would never get to have lead roles, reserved for seniors, in the annual school play and we wouldn’t get to graduate with our friends, some of whom had spent 11 years together, building deep relationships (I went to a K-12 where, like myself, some students had actually spent elementary, middle and high school years.) Essentially all our social ties--outside of our families and the neighborhoods we came from--were in an instant cut and the senior year we had spent so many years planning was taken from us.  I emphasize here that James Coleman describes these ties as in-school social capital, which facilitates a student’s ability to reach success in school and in many cases life. Moreover the psychological impact on us ranged from feelings of lack of belonging to feelings of hopelessness. 

Despite losing our immediate peer networks, most of the students in my class continued to have a relatively stable life beyond high school, so the blow of the losing our beloved school wasn’t very detrimental. I came from a middle class immigrant neighborhood with strong social ties. These social ties enabled my parents to leverage their social capital towards success in their children’s education and insulate me from the loss of my school. In addition, my parents still remained friends with the parents of classmates who lived close-by, thus maintaining some semblance of in-school social networks. Further, since I was a teenage and had some say in my own social life, I remained friends with my closest friends and saw them on school vacation breaks. Furthermore, I continued to go to private school and the school I went to next was actually a better resourced school. Although I didn’t become as popular as I was in my former high school, I did meet good people with whom I still communicate. Thus, I tapped into both my family’s social capital -and the network capital I built up until then- to facilitate my educational success. But what if i did not have these other networks? What if my parents did not remain friends with other parents? What if i was too young to still be able to choose to hang out with my friends? What if the next school that I went to was also under resourced?

More than often, when a school’s closes its doors, it is due failure. Schools that fail often do so because they are under-resourced in material or human capital. Under-resourced urban schools in particular, are often found in neighborhoods affected by high poverty rates. So when an urban school closes, many youth and their families are found in more dire circumstances than those I describe above. Studies have posited that a lack of social capital and institutional resources available to a community may contribute to a student’s inability to complete school (Chen, 2012; Coleman, 1988; Sampson, 2009; Sampson, 1999). While these community concerns do influence a student’s academic achievement, other studies have suggested that family characteristics significantly mediate the relationship between academic achievement/ student drop out and neighborhood factors (Ginther, Haveman, & Wolfe, 2000; Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2000; Plotnick & Hoffman, 1999). In light of this what are local community perceptions of school closings? How do they perceive the effects of school closings their community networks, cohesion, capital? Then…how do those local communities respond to these closings?