Study Looks At Intersection Of Low Enrollment, Low Performing Schools

Dozens of schools have closed in West Virginia over the past decade as enrollment in some counties has decreased by 20 percent or more. Declining school enrollment is a growing issue across the country, leading to widespread closures and consolidations. 

In a new national study, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute advocates that schools the state has identified as low-performing should be first in line when closure is considered.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute, said focusing on low-performing schools will help students have better outcomes in already difficult situations. 

“We know from research that if you close a school and the students end up in higher-performing schools as a result, they will do better academically,” he said. “On the flip side, if you close schools and the kids end up in lower performing schools, they’ll do worse.”

Petrilli acknowledged that any closure, regardless of analytics, will be harder for rural communities where alternatives are not nearby.

“In a city, you may have two schools that are relatively close to one another, and so if you close one, the kids don’t have to go very far to go to a better option,” he said “I understand that in the case of West Virginia, you may be talking about very long bus rides when a school closes, and it’s a big deal for these communities when they lose a school.”

The analysis identified nine schools in West Virginia that have both declining enrollment and have been identified by the state as low-performing. They are:

• Arnoldsburg School in Calhoun County 
• East Bank Middle School in Kanawha County
• Ranger Elementary in Lincoln County
• Duval Pk–8 School in Lincoln County
• Kimball Elementary School in Mcdowell County
• Cherry River Elementary School in Nicholas County
• Lakeside Elementary in Putnam County
• Wayne Middle School in Wayne County
• Mullens Middle School in Wyoming County 

The researchers used the states’ own judgments, using Comprehensive Support and Improvement designations (CSI), a provision in federal law requiring states to identify:

• The lowest-performing 5 percent of their Title I schools using a set of state-defined indicators.
• High schools with graduation rates below 67 percent.
• Title I schools with very low-performing subgroups of students that did not improve after being previously identified for “additional targeted support and improvement.

Petrilli is careful to point out that each state is allowed to determine its performance metrics, and it should be one of many considerations when making the difficult decision to close a school. Ultimately he said only a local community can determine if it’s appropriate to close one school in favor of another.

“From afar, it’s impossible to know,” he said. “Surely, there are some of those schools that are working on improving and, you know, may be on their way. There may be other ones, though, that have been chronically low performing for a long time and aren’t getting any better.“