Thomasina Clarke has watched school after school close in her once-thriving St. Louis neighborhood, which was hit by a tornado this spring and whose population has plummeted in recent decades. It's like a hole in the community, Clarke said.

St. Louis Public Schools is among the districts nationwide weighing how many urban schools to keep open due to shrinking budgets, the falling birthrate and a growing school choice movement. A district-commissioned report released this year found that the school system has more than twice the schools it needs.

Such decisions are gut-wrenching. It's a financial strain to operate half-empty schools, but research shows kids often fare badly after closures.

Elsewhere, Philadelphia, Boston, Houston and Norfolk, Virginia, are considering shuttering schools, while a public outcry over potential closures has stopped them—for now—in Seattle and San Francisco.

From 2019 to 2023, enrollment declined by 20% or more at nearly one in 12 public schools—roughly 5,100, according to a report published last year by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education think tank. Many were chronically low-performing schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, the report found.

Public school enrollment is projected to tumble 5.5% between 2022 and 2031, largely due to changing demographics, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Other factors include the shift by some students to private education or homeschooling and some immigrant families' decisions to leave the country.

Federal funds allowed many schools to stay open during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite tumbling enrollment numbers. But now the relief money is gone, and those underpopulated schools are a problem, said Aaron Garth Smith, director of education reform at Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank.

The takeaway is pretty clear, Smith said. Public school enrollment is declining. It's going to continue to fall for years to come. And so generally, state and local policymakers have to adapt to this new reality.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.