New Orleans needs to shutter multiple schools in the next few years to address declining enrollment, according to an outside analysis.
Officials typically close several schools a year under the city’s high-stakes charter system.
While that’s helped reduce seats, along with charter leaders' decisions to close or merge campuses, it hasn’t been enough to keep up with declining enrollment.
At a meeting last week, New Orleans school board president Leila Eames said closing schools would be tough, but it’s “what we were elected to do.”
“I’m sorry that this has to happen,” Eames said after receiving the report from New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO), a local nonprofit that works closely with the district on a range of issues.
Eames and other board members acknowledged that closing a school is never easy, even when necessary. Politically, it’s something officials try to avoid. Over the last few years, board members have encouraged charter leaders to act, leading to self-closures and consolidations, including some planned for the end of this school year.
“It’s not going to be easy, but in the end, we are going to have to make some really hard decisions,” said Carlos Zervigon, another board member. “We must do this quickly.”
What’s driving the decline?
The number of children who attend public schools has been falling — not just in the city, but statewide and beyond — since before the pandemic, and federal relief because of it helped stave off some cuts.
Data points to multiple causes: mainly lower birth rates, but also outmigration and an uptick in homeschooling and nontraditional schools. Private schools in Louisiana, however, have also seen declines.
Baton Rouge downsized its district last year, closing a half-dozen schools and merging two others. Jefferson Parish, the state's largest school system, has closed six schools since 2023, and its board is considering a second round of closures.
In New Orleans, enrollment in grades K-8 has dropped by nearly 3,000 students since 2020, a decline of 9%, according to NSNO’s analysis.
Figuring out how many students to plan for and make the most of limited funding to operate efficiently is a challenge all districts face.
NSNO has been analyzing enrollment at the district’s request since 2021. Based on birth rates, it estimates that the number of students attending New Orleans public schools will decline by another 10% by 2029.
But officials said there’s a bright spot.
According to the district, New Orleans is actually enrolling a higher percentage of children born in the city in public kindergarten than in recent years — 75% this past fall, up from 67% in 2020.
Max Daigh, the district’s head of data, said the increase shows a growing share of parents who trust the school system. But the district can’t enroll kids who don’t exist.
During the same period that K-8 enrollment dropped by 9%, the city’s high school population grew by 4%. This fall, however, it fell, almost erasing previous gains.
Holly Reid, with NSNO, said the “bubble” can be explained by larger groups of students who entered kindergarten between 2012 and 2014, around the time the city’s population peaked after Hurricane Katrina.
Another outlier was a one-year bump in 2024, driven by an increase in international immigrants, Reid said, that has since disappeared, likely due to the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Complicating the issue further, the number of low-performing schools at risk of closing under the district’s accountability system has dwindled, making it less clear which schools to close.
“We’re at the point where there’s no low-hanging fruit,” Daigh told board members. “These are going to be hard discussions.”
School funding is based on enrollment, and schools have fixed costs, so when too few students enroll, there’s less money for staffing, programming and extracurriculars.
To account for this, the district aims to fill at least 92% of available seats. Reid said its fill rate is 90%, though vacancies aren’t spread equally.
For example, the fill rate at one high school set to close over the summer is 60% this year. Some selective and other sought-after schools have rates exceeding 100%.
To fill 92% of its seats as enrollment continues to decline, Reid said the district needs to close five or six K-8 schools and two or three high schools in the next few years.
Board member Olin Parker said filling a higher percentage of seats is the only way to increase school funding, since state aid isn’t expected to increase and local tax revenue is expected to continue to drop.
“You have to have more students enrolled in those campuses,” he said. “That's the financial reality.”
Which schools to close?
This year’s report is the first time NSNO has shared the number of schools it believes need to close.
It’s a new frontier for a district that, with some guardrails, has largely allowed the market forces of its charter school system to shape the landscape.
The district is working to update an expiring 2023 policy to reduce the number of extra seats and move students into better-quality facilities. It incentivizes charter operators to merge schools by allowing leaders to move students and funding from one campus to another.
Daigh, with the district, said his team will consult school leaders on the policy before presenting a new version to the board in April.
“There is no single data point that is going to help us solve this,” Daigh told board members, adding that it doesn’t make sense to let facility quality be the only factor.
He said there are many additional qualifications to consider, among them: academic quality, enrollment, finances and community impact.
“We know what our schools mean to our communities, and we need to make sure that we are approaching this conversation in a thoughtful way,” Daigh said.
Board members voiced a variety of concerns following the presentation.
Katie Baudoin stressed the need to ensure that smaller, single-site schools aren’t disadvantaged over larger charter networks.
“It’s important that we have a diverse portfolio,” Baudoin said. “It would be easy for them to be the victims.”
