Now imagine if your school closed for good
Coronavirus school closures give us a glimpse into the experience of tens of thousands of families in urban neighborhoods where schools shuttered permanently
Adapted and reprinted from Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities by Andre Perry, with permission from Brookings Institution Press, © 2020 by Brookings Institution.
“When will schools open?” It’s a question that parents, employers and school leaders are struggling to answer amid a national pandemic that doesn’t seem to be letting up soon.
We’re all struggling in this new normal where our homes are standing in for schools and workplaces. Something has to give. Sometimes there simply isn’t enough room at the dining room table for homework, dinner and employment (if you have the luxury of working from home). I love my child, but, like many parents, I’m desperate for the day his school reopens. The longer this drags out, though, the more I’ve been thinking about the even bigger trauma faced by families whose schools close for good.
This period of social distancing is giving us a glimpse of what it’s like when a school is shuttered permanently, a tragedy tens of thousands of families have had to deal with over the last two decades. Like the coronavirus, the impact of permanent school closures disproportionately hit Black and urban neighborhoods. Of the 22,101 public schools that have closed since 2004, 3,927 (17 percent) of them were in Black-majority census tracts, and 3,395 of those schools (86 percent) were in urban areas.
$550 billion — the investment needed to bring schools nationwide up to standard due to damage caused by postponing repairs, according to a 2013 federal estimate.
Schools are linchpins of a community’s overall physical landscape and of what researcher Eric Klinenberg defines as social infrastructure: the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact. We use schools as polling stations and for neighborhood association meetings. Many students have fun on the playground when the school is closed. Schools hold the history and culture of a place through yearbooks, trophy cases, and photo archives. School traditions often connect one generation to the next, providing a sense of community stability and cohesion.
While the closures are often unavoidable — many districts close schools CONTINUE READING: Imagine if coronavirus school closures were permanent
