Karen Seymour’s three kids just started attending Élan Academy in New Orleans this fall, but she’s already thinking of what she might have to do if the school closes.
She transferred her kids to Élan after the state board of education closed their old school, Athlos Academy in Jefferson Parish, in May for low academic performance.
The Seymours live in New Orleans, but because Athlos was a state-run school, it was open to students from any parish. Seymour said she wasn’t aware that the school had been struggling academically.
Two of Seymour’s children are autistic. Her 9-year-old daughter, Penelope, struggled for years to verbally communicate with peers and teachers. Penelope had been at Athlos Academy since kindergarten and started talking at school in second grade. But after Seymour had to transfer Penelope to Élan Academy for third grade, Seymour said, Penelope “shut down again.”
“When she came here, she was looking for her old friends, her old teachers,” Seymour said. “It’s just hard for kids with special needs to have to adapt to new change, new scenery, new faces.”
Seymour isn’t alone in being worried about school closures. A recent Cowen Institute poll of 1,000 parents and guardians in New Orleans found that 61% of respondents worried that their children’s schools would close due to underenrollment. Among respondents with special-needs children, the figure rose to 70%.
According to a new NOLA Public Schools district enrollment report, Élan Academy — like about half of the city's public schools — is underenrolled. District Superintendent Fateama Fulmore will present the report to the Orleans Parish School Board during a special meeting on Thursday. But plans for how to “right-size” the district — close schools and move more students into fewer buildings — won’t be presented until a Dec. 9 board meeting, so it’s not yet clear whether the Seymour family will have to find yet another school.
Among the city’s underenrolled schools, a handful have fill rates of just over 60%, well below the 91% goal. The most underenrolled are L.B. Landry High School, Booker T. Washington High School, Walter L. Cohen High School, Samuel J. Green Charter School, Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School for Sci Tech and Lycee Francais International de la Louisiane. Élan Academy’s fill rate is around 83%.
Low enrollment doesn't guarantee a school will close. The report says that the decisions addressing underenrollment will “be dependent on other district processes” — although it does not clarify what those processes might be — and be dependent on neighborhood needs. However, the district doesn’t expect to reach 100% enrollment efficiency this year.
“At the same time, maximizing utilization is not the goal,” the report reads. “A healthy system needs some available capacity to preserve family choice, accommodate students entering or moving within the system, offer a diversity of school models, and respond to changes in demand.”
Higher test scores, lower letter grades
Seymour said the thought of Élan Academy closing has crossed her mind. In fact, because the district is taking geography into account in closure decisions, Élan, which is located in Algiers, may be safer than some underenrolled East Bank schools. Recent analysis from influential education nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans, shared with Verite News, cautioned against closing West Bank schools because additional closures would force hundreds of students into long commutes across the river.
If she does have to deal with another school closure, though, Seymour said she’ll start homeschooling her children. She said it’s been hard to watch her children struggle to adjust to a new school and try again to build their confidence through a difficult, disruptive transition.
“I see all the closures going on now, and I’m like, ‘Wow, I hope this school doesn’t shut down because then I have to take them out again,’” Seymour said. “But if that does happen, I don’t want to send them through that all over again.”
According to the Cowen poll, parents were less worried about their own children’s schools closing because of poor performance. Just 42% of respondents said that was a concern. That may be because parents have higher opinions of public school performance than in the past. Thirty-two percent of respondents gave New Orleans public schools an A or B grade, up 3 points from last year’s poll, and fewer respondents rated them with a D or F.
But while New Orleans parents may feel more favorably about the district’s academic performance, especially with rising test scores, the letter grades the state will assign later this month will likely drop because of a new accountability system that grades schools on a statewide bell curve. Only 35% of parents said they had heard about changes to the state grading system, according to the poll.
The stricter grading system, combined with a new policy that makes it easier for the NOLA Public Schools district to close charters before their renewal year, will likely put more schools on the chopping block. Already, one school, Fannie C. Williams Elementary, agreed to close at the end of the school year because of poor academic performance. Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School for Sci Tech, the only public school in the Lower 9th Ward, is facing the threat of district-imposed closure for the same reason.
Thanks to a new state law, the district can also close schools for not having enough students if the district is in a state of overcapacity, which it is.
The ‘emotional weight’ of school closures
Public school enrollment has been dropping for years in New Orleans and around the country, with the steepest decreases occurring after the COVID-19 pandemic.
In New Orleans, enrollment has declined by about 10% since 2019, according to district data. Jesse Chanin, an education researcher with the Coalition for Compassionate Schools, said the district had been alerted to the coming enrollment crisis as early as 2019, before the pandemic, when kindergarten enrollment began to noticeably decrease.
Despite that, the district added five new schools for the 2019-2020 school year. Still, closures outpaced additions. While schools might have changed hands, passing between operators and the district or vice versa, no new public charter school has been opened since fall of 2021. The total number of schools has decreased from 87 in 2018 to 61 in 2026.
The current enrollment crisis the district faces was “completely avoidable,” Chanin said, had the district not agreed to open new charters in the first place.
But now, district officials say downsizing will have to continue to make schools financially viable. Fewer students in school buildings means each school gets less state funding, leading to tighter budgets and potential program cuts. So having more students in fewer buildings makes sense — at least from a financial standpoint.
The district’s schedule gives parents little time to prepare for a school closure. The NOLA Public Schools Common App Process (formerly OneApp) opens in November and closes in late January, but Seymour said she’d want to plan well before those deadlines. Seymour said learning about a closure a year in advance would be most helpful for her, and wanted more community involvement in how closure decisions are made.
“I just think they need to come to something to where the communities and the superintendents of the school, or charter, or however it goes, need to sit down and have a big meeting about this instead of waiting till the last minute to let you know, ‘OK, we shutting down,’” Seymour said.
With little information available, rumors have festered.
Tricia Cacioppo’s daughter is a junior at New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School (Sci High). The state shut down her old school, New Harmony High School, last spring.
Cacioppio said her daughter has heard rumors that Sci High could close if it receives low test scores. The school has a 96% enrollment rate, well above the district goal. Despite it being a C-rated school academically, and with no indication that it is being considered for closure, Cacioppo said she worries about it “every day."
“I’m like, ‘Well, is your school still open?’” Cacioppio said. “Because after going through that last year, it’s a thing that you have to actually worry about.”
Rumors can hurt schools, Chanin said, if parents pre-emptively pull their children from a school they believe might close. That was the case for Lionel Franklin, whose son was attending L.B. Landry High School as of a few weeks ago. When Franklin heard that the school might close, he immediately transferred his son to another school and said he “didn’t want to get caught up in the moment.”
Parents who spoke to Verite News said they wanted to see more transparency and longer timelines in the school closure process. Last month, Allisyn Swift, the executive director of the Coalition for Compassionate Schools, suggested a similar idea to the Orleans Parish School Board during a committee meeting. There is a historical context of Black schools being targeted for closure during the post-Reconstruction era in the 19th century and school integration in the 20th, which should be acknowledged, Swift said.
The vast majority of New Orleans public schools are largely Black, but schools with the highest proportions of white students have better performance scores and are therefore likely safe from closure.
“That is why there’s the tone that comes along with schools closing that brings a lot more emotional weight than just what the facts are around school closure,” Swift said during the meeting.
Swift recommended that the school board offer avenues of public participation, including listening sessions, to acknowledge the loss of community that comes along with a school closure.
Chanin, a researcher at the Coalition for Compassionate Schools, said the district could structure discussions in a way that is productive and provides closure.
“It doesn’t just need to be a free-for-all where everyone’s yelling at the board,” Chanin said. “Thinking about how could we facilitate this in a way that does provide a people with a voice and an outlet and is meaningful to people and feels democratic.”
In a recent board committee meeting, Fulmore said the district has worked to increase parent engagement around the closure process. The district has recently held meetings about charter renewals and closures, including at L.B. Landry and Fannie C. Williams. Board policy only requires the district to inform the public of a potential school closure two weeks before closure recommendations are presented in December, Fulmore said.
“This administration is going above and beyond, not because we are asked to do it, we are required to do it, but because we believe it is the right thing to do in informing families,” Fulmore said. “We’re out here talking to you face-to-face and not just sending you something in the mail to join us at a meeting to hear the outcome of our decision.”
Audio story edited by Aubri Juhasz