As FWISD weighs campus closures, these parents are trying to save their kids’ school
Over the past few weeks, Zach Leonard has taken on a new role, on top of working as the general manager of a car dealership and raising his three kids. He’s organizing a group of parents to try to convince officials in the Fort Worth Independent School District not to close his youngest daughter’s school.
Leonard’s daughter Lorelei is a third-grader at North Hi Mount Elementary School. The campus, which is between the North Hi Mount and Monticello neighborhoods, is one of about two dozen that district officials are eyeing for possible closure in the coming years. At a time when the district’s enrollment is declining, Fort Worth ISD officials say closing or combining under-enrolled schools, as well as smaller campuses like North Hi Mount, could be a more cost-effective move than keeping them open.
But the idea has come up against pushback from families of students at those schools, who say shutting them down would disrupt their kids’ education and rob their neighborhoods of vital community hubs. At North Hi Mount, parents have gotten organized, creating signs and shirts and holding rallies, all in hopes of convincing district leaders to let the school stay open.
“It’s more than about the building,” Leonard said. “It’s about the people in the community.”
FWISD schools face declining enrollment, population challenges
During a school board workshop last month, district officials released a list of schools that were flagged for possible closure under certain scenarios. The Arlington Heights area was one of four pyramids with four campuses on the list. North Hi Mount and South Hi Mount elementary schools and Stripling and Monnig middle schools were all flagged for possible closure.
Those four campuses illustrate some of the challenges Fort Worth ISD faces as it plans for future facilities needs. All four schools are in ZIP codes where the population of school-age children declined by about 7% over the past five years, U.S. Census data shows. Enrollment at Monnig and Stripling dropped by almost 30% between 2019 and 2024, leaving both schools with more than a third of their seats empty.
Enrollment declines were considerably more modest at North Hi Mount during that five-year period. But the campus is only designed to accommodate 271 students, making it one of the district’s smallest school buildings. In community meetings last week, Tracy Richter, vice president for planning at the consulting firm HPM, told parents and other community members that keeping smaller schools like North Hi Mount operating is less cost effective than merging them to form bigger campuses. Fort Worth ISD spends more than $15,000 per student at schools with fewer than 300 students, compared to about $9,000 per student at schools with enrollments upwards of 600.
But North Hi Mount parents say the building’s capacity is misleading. The school’s actual enrollment has stood well above that figure for at least five years. To create extra space, several classes meet in portable classroom units — a common solution at overcrowded schools, but one that district officials say isn’t ideal because it makes it harder for those teachers to collaborate with their colleagues.
Leonard said he hopes to convince the district to invest in North Hi Mount rather than shutting it down. His wife works as the school’s librarian. Leonard’s two older kids also went to North Hi Mount before moving on to Stripling Middle School and Arlington Heights High School. Those connections, plus the years he’s spent on the school’s PTA, have helped him see why the school is worth fighting for, he said.
North Hi Mount has a group of effective teachers, many of whom have been at the school for several years, Leonard said. In particular, he’s been happy with the experience his youngest daughter has had in the school’s two-way bilingual program. He’s worried that, if the district closes North Hi Mount, those teachers wouldn’t move with their students to whatever campus they’re merged into. Fort Worth ISD officials have said no teachers will lose their jobs as a result of school closures. But exactly where those affected teachers would end up teaching is less clear.
Erin Lyons, the mother of two boys at North Hi Mount, said her kids were upset at the news. They worried about the possibility of being separated from their friends if North Hi Mount’s student body is divided between two campuses. She’s tried to reassure them that, no matter what happens, they’ll have a great school to attend, she said. But beyond that, she can’t give them much specific information, she said.
Lyons’ daughter is a seventh-grader at Stripling, so she likely won’t be affected by any of the changes. But recently, she told her mom that she was looking forward to participating in a tradition at Arlington Heights in which graduating seniors return to their elementary schools for a small celebration. If the district closes North Hi Mount, she worries she’ll be left out of that tradition.
Beyond her kids’ personal experiences, Lyons said the idea that the district would close a campus that’s been educating elementary students for 90 years is unimaginable. She’d like to see district leaders take overcrowding at the school — and the need for portable classrooms to alleviate it — as a sign that North Hi Mount is worth investing in, not that it needs to be shut down.
“Our dream would be that they just add on to our building to permanently house the kids we have,” she said.
Since last month’s board workshop, district officials have downplayed the list of possible closures, emphasizing that no decisions had been made yet. In a community meeting last month at Arlington Heights United Methodist Church, Kellie Spencer, the district’s deputy superintendent, told a roomful of concerned parents that the idea of shuttering Stripling or converting it into an elementary school — another scenario that was discussed at the board workshop — isn’t viable. The district is in the middle of a $60 million renovation project at the school, making it unlikely that officials would decide to close it anytime soon, Spencer said.
But closing North Hi Mount is still on the table. During a community meeting Thursday evening at Benbrook Middle-High School, Richter, the district’s consultant, presented scenarios that included shutting the campus down and either sending its students to an expanded South Hi Mount, or splitting them between South Hi Mount and Burton Hill elementary schools. Boos and jeers erupted from the audience, prompting Interim Superintendent Karen Molinar to step in and quiet the crowd before Richter continued.
Leonard, the North Hi Mount parent, said closing the school and sending its students elsewhere would be a blow to the community. North Hi Mount is a neighborhood hub, he said. Every year, when the school’s PTA holds its neighborhood carnival at the school, they bring in thousands of dollars in donations, he said. He doubts parents would be willing to get that invested in a school that wasn’t so close to home.
“It’s a place where we all gather for choir recitals and plays, PTA meetings, where we’ve met all of our neighbors,” he said. “If that goes away, a lot of that community structure dissolves.”
Declining enrollment presents thorny issues for districts
The parents in North Hi Mount are just one of many groups rallying against school closures in Fort Worth ISD, which itself is one of many districts nationwide that are grappling with what to do in the face of declining enrollment. In big urban school districts across the country, including New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, school officials are proposing plans to close and merge small and under-enrolled campuses. Joshua Goodman, a professor at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, said the trend is the product of two forces coming together at the same time.
The first issue is declining birth rates, Goodman said. Last year, the national birth rate dipped by 3% compared to the year before, reaching a historic low point, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Except for a modest rebound in 2021, birth rates have consistently declined by about 2% each year for the past decade, the CDC reported. The U.S. Census Bureau projects those declines will continue through this century. Without major shifts in other factors like immigration, fewer babies being born in any given year generally leads to a decline in kindergarten enrollment about five years later.
Layered on top of the decades-long decline in birth rates is another, newer trend, Goodman said: During the pandemic, a large number of families either left traditional public schools or opted not to enroll their kids there in the first place. Some of those families left out of frustration over school COVID protocols like mask mandates and remote learning, he said. Others were concerned for their kids’ physical health, he said, so they pulled them out of school and switched to homeschooling.
There isn’t solid data showing how many of the families who moved to homeschooling during the early days of the pandemic came back to public schools later, Goodman said. But in the states where researchers have delved into that question, they’ve generally found that most, but not all, of those families eventually returned, he said.
But that isn’t the case among families who pulled their kids out of public schools and enrolled them in private schools, Goodman said. Years later, those families haven’t returned in numbers as large as those who switched to homeschooling, he said.
Enrollment declines, and the revenue declines they create, leave school districts with few good options to choose from, Goodman said. In districts where school closures are inevitable, he said, leaders need to be clear about how much money the process will save, and how they plan to put that money toward boosting the quality of their programs and easing the transition for students affected by the cuts. The process will never be painless, he said, but districts at least need to do everything they can to make it as smooth as possible.
“That’s a hard thing to navigate,” Goodman said. “No one is going to be happy about it, but there are ways to maybe mitigate some of the challenges.”
You can read more about the facilities master planning process on the Fort Worth ISD website.
This story was originally published March 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
