GRAND RAPIDS — Diana Wallace drives away from the neighborhood she loves and the elementary school she wishes her first grade son could attend, passing multiple other schools before arriving at one 20 minutes away.
Criss-crossing Grand Rapids is the new normal for Wallace and other parents as they deal with the consequences of a plan by the city's school district to close nine public school buildings and make overdue renovations to others.
"We would love to be able to walk to school and know the children in our neighborhood," said Wallace, who is running for school board this November out of concerns with the plan. "We are seriously down a bad path (with this plan)."
Most parents in Michigan oppose school closures. They are among the most emotional and controversial changes made by K-12 school districts across Michigan. They displace students and upset communities, even when they are the most practical way to deal with declining enrollment.
An estimated 1,197 K-12 public and charter schools have closed in Michigan since 2000, according to a Detroit News analysis of data from the state Center for Educational Performance and Information and the National Center for Education Statistics.
More buildings are expected to close as districts grapple with the reality of having too many buildings and not enough students to fill them — and a future with fewer schoolchildren.
While the majority of closures have been in Detroit, every corner of the state has been impacted. Data shows closures are happening more in large city and large suburban districts in Wayne and Oakland counties, but also in rural areas of the Upper Peninsula and Michigan's Thumb, and in affluent suburbs like Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills.
Elected school boards in locally operated districts made the most closures, with 971 buildings shuttered across the state. Charter schools, which are independent districts known as public school academies in Michigan, closed 186 of their own buildings. Intermediate school districts closed 28 and the state closed two schools it operated.
For the last two decades, Michigan's school-age population has slid downward 20%, from 1.69 million K-12 students in 2002-03 to 1.351 million in 2025-26. The state's declining birth rate is the primary driver, but private school enrollment and homeschooling also chip away at the number of students who show up for public school in Michigan.
Michigan's birth rate decline is expected to persist through 2050, according to estimates. And in the world of public education, where kids in seats drive revenue, enrollment losses mean less funding for districts to operate, and pressure has built for schools across Michigan and the nation to reconfigure.
"And the problem is, you can't close them fast enough," said Ken Gutman, superintendent of Oakland Schools, the intermediate school district in Oakland County, which has 28 local districts and 175,000 students. "You look at the projections, and you have to be out ahead of the curve to get buildings closed to be efficient."
"There will be districts closing buildings over the next several years; they're going to have to. The birth rate won't be getting better," Gutman said of Oakland County. "To provide the most opportunity for students and the best experiences, you need to be efficient with your building usage. You simply can't afford to have extra buildings."
Nationally, school closures have spiked 35% across the country over the past four years, The Washington Post reported in July. Districts closed more than 1,000 schools in 2025-26, compared with 755 in 2021-22, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Experts call it the "big shrink" and warn public education leaders must proactively plan for a future with fewer children.
Half-empty schools
This year, Grand Rapids, Detroit Public Schools Community District and Detroit are working through rounds of closures, and multiple districts are exploring options for closures and consolidation with the help of grants from the Michigan Department of Education.
Plans to reorganize Grand Rapids schools began in 2023 when school officials learned that the average rate of school building use — a formula that compares actual student enrollment with the school's enrollment capacity — was 51% with 13,514 students in 43 buildings and a capacity of 26,586.
The district held meetings to publicize the problem, solicited community input and debated solutions. Estimating it spent $4 million a year on unused space, it launched a multi-year plan to close nine school buildings through 2032. It will also renovate several others and construct one new school.
"We were spending millions of dollars each year on maintenance costs for the buildings that we were not fully utilizing," Luke Stier, the district's spokesman, told The News. "As we've talked to our GRPS community here, we're really trying to bring that data forward and explain the situation we're in, and how by closing buildings and no longer spending money on portions of buildings that we're not utilizing, it allows us to redirect our funds to the classroom, to our staff."
While the Grand Rapids plan comes without any staff layoffs, it's not pain-free, as families have had to say goodbye to long-standing neighborhood schools. Farewell parties were held for the first two schools that closed in 2024.
Alexandra Sterk's school, Sibley Elementary School, absorbed students and teachers from Stocking Elementary, one of the first schools to close under the GRPS plan at the end of the 2023-24 school year.
"All the teachers have to follow with them (students), so they're still connected with their community, and then they've just become part of our Sibley community, so that's been really cool to see," Sterk said in her classroom during a summer school session in July. "Our family has just grown."
A plan for getting smaller
Marguerite Roza, a research professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and director of its Edunomics Lab, told The News that public school districts across the country, including those in Michigan, are heading into an era of shrinking enrollment resulting in lower revenues, and school leaders need a plan for getting smaller. She calls the phenomenon "the big shrink."
"The problem with enrollment decline is that it's continuing," Roza said. "If there are fewer babies born than five years from now, there'll be fewer kindergartners and first graders, and then there'll be fewer second graders, etc. It's continuing to shrink, and so that means the school systems just have to get more nimble and be more adaptive, even when the population is shrinking."
Done right, shrinking can be an opportunity to build smaller, stronger and more effective school systems for the students who remain, Roza said. That includes implementing a policy that monitors enrollment shrinkage relative to building capacity in a district.
"'I don't think it's like you do this once and you never have to do it again," Roza said.
Michigan has 2,800 open school buildings across nearly 600 traditional school districts. Charter school districts operate another 376 buildings. There are also 119 school buildings operated by ISDs, and the Michigan Department of Education operates three school buildings.
In 2000, there were 27 school closures. That number spiked to 124 closures in 2010. Since 2015, school closures in Michigan have stayed under 50 per year and reached a low of five in 2026.
About 92% of students in Michigan attend a public school, while nearly 8% attend a nonpublic, private school or homeschool.
In Michigan, 116,273 students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were enrolled in nonpublic schools in the 2025-26 school year, down nearly 3,000 from the prior year, when 119,262 attended, according to state Education Department data.
Many families began homeschooling during the pandemic, but the data is not exact, since Michigan homeschool registration is voluntary. The state reported 941 homeschool pre-K-12 students in the 2025-26 year, up from 781 the prior year.
Michael Van Beek, director of research for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said that while there was a post-COVID bump in private school and homeschool enrollment, that trend has less of an impact on statewide student enrollment than the natural decline from lower birth rates and population factors.
"(Homeschoolers) don't have a significantly large effect when taking into consideration the natural population decline," Van Beek said.
To count school closures since 2000, The News used data from the Center for Educational Performance and Information, the state's official data collection for school information, and cross-referenced it with data from the National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES, to compile a closure list.
Michigan does not require districts to conduct use assessments or analyze utilization rates to determine how student enrollment compares with a building's capacity.
"Decisions on whether to close schools should be made at the local district level based on input from the community," state Department of Education spokesman Bob Wheaton said.
Jennifer Smith, director of government relations for the Michigan Association of School Boards, said the state has not tracked closures closely because local districts own and operate the buildings and must find the money to close them and move staff and students.
"If you wanted to know how many empty buildings there are around the state, you'd have to find out from each district,” Smith said.
Under a 2013 law, the state can close only school districts not deemed "financially viable." The state superintendent dissolved the Buena Vista and Inkster school districts.
That law was tested when in 2019 Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's administration recommended closing two Benton Harbor high schools to avoid the complete dissolution of the predominantly African American district, arguing a smaller K-8 system would make it easier for officials to pay off $18.4 million in debts. Community outrage ensued, and the school board rejected the plan.
Detroit public schools no stranger to closures
According to the data, large city districts, which have more at-risk students, have closed the most schools.
Michigan's largest school district, Detroit Public Schools Community District, has closed more than 200 school buildings since 2000 — many without notice or community engagement when the district was under state control.
The district once boasted more than 250,000 students. It now educates about 50,000 students in preschool through 12th grade and operates fewer than 100 buildings. It has seats for 72,000 students.
School closures displace students and upset communities, which lose a public gathering space for social, civic and cultural events, said Imani Foster, a spokesperson for 482forward, a coalition of parents, youth and neighborhood organizations advocating for education justice in Detroit.
"Schools are really like a part of the structure of neighborhoods in Detroit, especially neighborhood schools," Foster said. "Kids in the neighborhood are the only ones that attend them. They walk there, they carpool, you know. They play at the park during the summer, and like that's their school, their neighborhood school. And so we've actually seen a lot of upset parents and students at the fact that schools are closing."
In 2022, Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti launched a 20-year facility master plan that addresses the district's long-term needs and realities. The plan calls for building new schools, renovating others and closing some.
The DPSCD board annually reviews the status and enrollment of small schools, which are defined as schools where revenue from current student enrollment does not adequately fund building programming and operations. It has mandated this procedure since 2023.
According to a 2025 report, the district was operating 19 schools for which 2024-25 revenue doesn’t fully cover costs. One school had a 5% utilization rate. The district closed four of those 19 schools at the end of June: Ann Arbor Trail Magnet School, J.E. Clark Preparatory Academy, Catherine Blackwell Institute and Greenfield Union Elementary-Middle School.
Vitti told The News that no one wants to close schools, but districts need to start with solid, accurate data and information on their school buildings and student populations and have the hard conversations at the school board table with the public.
"What you cannot do is tell people at the end of the (school) year that you're going to close schools," Vitti said. "What I have learned and what I know is, people are completely capable of understanding the challenges that a district has around funding and enrollment, but you have to take the time to explain what the challenges are, what the data say, and allow people to weigh in on the decisions that you're making, and be open to making some adjustments."
Community members opposed the demolition of the long-closed but beloved Cooley High School in June. The school, built in 1927, closed in June 2010. A fire destroyed the school's auditorium in 2017. Multiple public sessions, including a round in March, explained that the building would be fully demolished, yet members of the Cooley alumni community pushed back. One sued.
The district did inform parents in 2022 about the planned four closures in June, which were scheduled in phases as students aged up by grade, said Foster, the Detroit education justice advocate. The district did recommend new schools to families. The plan was accelerated, Foster said, which upset some parents.
482forward has been holding community meetings to help parents transition their children into new schools and understand the district's consolidation and closure plan. Many parents, some of whom were students at the time, have lived through chaotic and sudden school closures from 2009 to 2016 that were forced by state-appointed emergency managers.
"The history of school closure in Detroit is so traumatic and visceral," Foster said. "It leaves a bad stain in our minds and in our hearts because back in history, schools were being threatened to be closed because of student outcomes, and so they felt like we're blaming the kids. 'They can't read, they can't write, they don't know math,' and so we're closing the schools. And I think that not many people have actually healed from that past."
State grants aid consolidation
Districts can close school buildings, reconfigure grades across buildings or consolidate with other districts to accommodate fewer students. The state's education department has been awarding districts consolidation grants to help them get smaller internally, but the need and demand far outweigh available funds.
Consolidation grants started small in 2014 with $5 million going to schools. They reached a peak in 2024 at $135 million going to schools, followed by $75 million in 2025.
In the 2023-24 school year, the Michigan Department of Education gave $4.8 million to 17 local school districts and 11 ISDs to study consolidation and later awarded $135 million to eight districts, seven ISDs and the Lansing Public Schools.
In 2025, MDE awarded $75 million in grants to three districts that wanted to close and consolidate school buildings but needed financial help. Demand exceeded the money available — 51 applicants requested more than $626 million— illustrating the need for additional funding for school consolidation and infrastructure projects.
But the state did not give out consolidation grants in the 2026 school aid budget — it switched to funding for infrastructure. MDE awarded the majority of the grants for roof and HVAC projects because legislators prioritized that work, MDE's Wheaton said.
Michigan districts are taking declining enrollment and the need to close buildings as an opportunity to conduct a landscape analysis and determine the right size for their district, said Peter Spadafore, executive director of the Michigan Alliance for Student Opportunity.
"Those are real-world discussions that are happening in larger or urban districts and districts with high concentrations of vulnerability, at-risk students more so than suburban districts. But you can't overlook the rural districts as well where a millage doesn't yield enough to build the whole school," said Spadafore, whose organization provides enrollment projection services for its member districts.
Consolidation between districts, an unpopular and rarely used choice in Michigan, would not solve the state's slowing birthrate dilemma nor its enrollment slide, Spadafore said. What would help is continued assistance from the state to help districts get smaller, he said.
How one district is consolidating
The state Department of Education gave Union City $23.6 million in state grants in 2025 to consolidate three school buildings into two by renovating the elementary and high school and demolishing the middle school. The small village is about 10 miles northwest of Coldwater in southwest Michigan.
"We are pretty much the prototype school district for having both those needs in significant ways," Superintendent Patrick McKerr said. "We are dwindling in enrollment. We have more school of choice students than we've ever had before, but our enrollment is lower than it's ever been before as well. So it just speaks to the dwindling number of students who live in our district, which is not unique to us."
Some school districts, McKerr said, did not apply for the grant originally because they heard about consolidation and they thought it meant between districts. He declined to identify those districts, but said Union City was ready for the assistance.
McKerr said his district did have some conversations with neighboring districts about whether they had any interest in consolidating districts. They did not.
"At which point, that kind of left us one option of pursuing this on our own, and it took a lot of work for us to put it together," McKerr said. "Our school board and our superintendent at the time were very forward-thinking, (given) the fact that we had to do something."
McKerr said the district also asked voters to approve a bond to address expenses from declining enrollment and facilities upgrades, knowing the state consolidation money was also coming in. In addition, solar farms coming into the area meant the school district could levy taxes on that property.
In Union City and elsewhere, school buildings do more than educate. Sometimes, they serve as places for a community to heal after a tragedy.
In March, an EF3 tornado with estimated winds of at least 150 miles per hour hit Union City. Three people were killed and at least a dozen homes at Union Lake were destroyed. The district's high school served as the epicenter of the community's recovery efforts and a place for healing and comfort for students and adults.
McKerr is grateful his district was able to get the help it needed and that his schools will get the needed renovations to serve students and be places for the community to gather in times of celebration and need.
"There is an unbelievable need from districts similar to ours all across the state that face similar struggles that we do, and thankfully we were on the forward end of it, and we were able to get one of these grants early on, because they are extremely competitive, and there are more districts than ever applying for these now."