'Who wants to buy it?': Most shuttered schools across the city still sit vacant

Alejandro Guerrero Jr., a 16-year-old high school junior, remembers attending Carroll Bell Elementary before it closed.

"Now that I'm back here, it brings back a lot of memories," he said. "Seeing these classrooms, and everything, walking the halls."

Three years ago, the Harlandale Independent School District board voted to close Guerrero's former elementary school. But now, the campus that once taught Guerrero as a young student welcomes him back as a high schooler.

Under a new vision and name, the Carroll Bell Education Center operates as a hands-on training campus that prepares students interested in trade or technical careers. In Guerrero's case, that means taking courses in his former elementary classroom-turned-computer lab to get certified in information technology.

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"It's something I never thought would happen," Guerrero said. "Everyone's grown in this little school."

Across San Antonio, school boards have voted to close 37 campuses since 2023 as districts face budget deficits driven by declining enrollment and largely stagnant state funding that has not kept pace with inflation. Unlike Carroll Bell, many of the shuttered schools still sit vacant.

Districts have either partnered with outside organizations or internally repurposed about a dozen schools for new educational uses. Others sit in limbo as school systems try to find takers for large spaces that often come with a long list of deferred maintenance tasks. Usually, districts bank on the savings of no longer having to operate a school, rather than on profits from selling or leasing them, two tasks that have proven difficult across the city.

Public schools' financial woes and the broader effect of school closures on surrounding neighborhoods have prompted local leaders to ask whether they can help school systems and what that support might look like.

"I certainly don't want to see another school close," Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones said. "I also, of course, recognize the very difficult fiscal challenges of the school district and the community."

The mayor believes some districts could partner with the city to repurpose former schools as affordable housing or early education spaces. Jones believes investing in preschool and early childhood learning could bolster the local economy by giving families a place to send their kids while they work and providing children access to quality learning at a young age.

"I think this has to be a top priority for city leaders," she said.

Intertwined futures

San Antonio ISD, the area's oldest district, encompasses the city's urban core and serves just over 40,000 students - a number that has declined for the past two decades.

"One of our challenges is our small footprint," said Patti Salzmann, San Antonio ISD's deputy superintendent, who spearheaded the district's rightsizing plan to shutter 15 schools in 2023.

Some campuses are more than 100 years old, and many SAISD schools are in disrepair or too small to house the ideal number of students. Operating older facilities can be costly.

Since closing 15 schools in the past three years, district leaders have repurposed four shuttered campuses to house smaller academic programs. The remaining closed campuses remain in limbo - not sold or actively leased.

SAISD has sorted its vacant properties into several categories based on each one's expected future use. The district has kept some schools as temporary swing spaces to educate students while their home campuses undergo renovations. It has given a special designation to three other buildings for their historical significance and is hoping to find partners that will find a new use for them that honors that history.

In some cases, SAISD has listed properties for sale because district leaders believe they are unlikely to become school sites again. Other sites are available through a bidding process that allows outside organizations to submit plans to lease or purchase buildings.

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District leaders consider several factors before closing a school, including how many nearby campuses can take on those students, academic proficiency, enrollment and whether specific programs are offered elsewhere across the city, Salzmann said.

She's hoping for more collaboration with local leaders around the closed and vacant schools, noting that the San Antonio Housing Trust is taking a preliminary look at several campuses that could be potentially be repurposed for residential use.

"One of the things that we talked to the city and county about is our desire to be more collaborative with them around the livelihood of the district," Salzmann said. "We see our futures as intertwined."

Prior to closing more than a dozen campuses in 2023, SAISD held town halls for community members to gather feedback and present updates on the process. Before voters elected her to City Council, West Side representative Teri Castillo attended some of those meetings.

"Through school closures, we're seeing so much divestment in our community," Castillo said. "When someone's looking to buy and or sell a house, folks are looking for a school, so the closures impact so much more, and it's just very infuriating."

The SAISD board voted to close two more schools in her district ahead of the coming school year. She hopes the board will take action soon in finding suitors for the shuttered schools.

"I'm eager for there to be action, but I am understanding of the financial situation in which the ISD is in," Castillo said noting the district's budget deficit, difficulty of selling a school and the limited architectural uses a school presents. "I'm hopeful that they will continue to be willing partners with nonprofits to conduct more community hubs, resiliency centers, and or accessible housing."

A national issue

Campuses often sit idle for several years after they close as schools.

Ray Hart, the Council of Great City Schools' executive director, noted that San Antonio is not alone in dealing with the challenge. His organization is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that partners with urban districts across the country to offer resources and consulting advice.

"The need to right-size the footprint of the district, as well as understanding staffing changes needed to occur, is something that's happening to all of our districts," Hart said.

Though Bexar County school systems face some unique local challenges, campus closures are happening across the country. They disproportionately harm minority students, Ariel Bierbaum, an urban studies and planning professor at the University of Maryland, said.

The typical reasons to close a campus, including low test scores, underused buildings in disrepair and inadequate funding to keep campuses open, often show up in communities with higher rates of poverty, Bierbaum said.

In her research, she has often seen districts create plans to repurpose a school before deciding to close it, or partner with the city to reuse a site. The latter keeps the building in public use, which Bierbaum called a best practice.

"Even if that public interest is no longer as a school, there are ways to still think about those school buildings as really important public infrastructure, and there are risks when we sell those off into the private market," she said.

The public may have less access or accountability for the buildings that were built to serve them. Districts also may struggle to sell a school because the buildings often serve a narrow architectural purpose, she said.

New life

In some of the city's smaller districts, closed down schools now have new public purposes, either within their school systems or serving surrounding communities.

South San Antonio ISD has closed four schools over the past several years. Palo Alto College uses the gym at what was Kazen Middle School; the former West Campus High School now houses the district's administrative staff, and the school system plans to keep Kindred Elementary within the district because it sits next to South San Antonio High School, spokesperson Alexis LaFosse said.

What used to be Athens Elementary is being converted into a community service hub offering medical and social services, such as food, counseling and clothing, to the area's residents.

Former City Councilwoman Adriana Rocha Garcia, CEO of the Center for Health Empowerment in South Texas, is spearheading the project and hopes to open the center at the end of the summer.

Including Caroll Bell, Harlandale ISD has converted three of its four shut-down schools for new purposes in the district. What was Morrill Elementary is now a family engagement and student support services center. The former Rayburn Elementary now houses the district's police department.

The district also converted a facility that once served students with disabilities into a makerspace, where students can do arts and crafts and other hands-on learning activities.

"We're providing a space of enrichment of learning and transformation within these two arenas, and I think the community was on board," said Meghan Guerrero, who oversees the district's career and technical education and science and technology programs.

Daniel Peña teaches information technology and cybersecurity to students - including Guerrero - at Caroll Bell. He's been with the district for five years and moved from Harlandale High School to take on a new role at the trades-focused campus.

Peña said that converting the former elementary school has fostered an environment where students seem more focused on learning. He enjoys teaching more than he used to.

"School closures kind of seem rough a little bit," Peña said. "But then I think it could bring other opportunities for our students, because we didn't have welding, we didn't have electrical, plumbing, HVAC, barbering, dental, and when they shut down the school, we repurposed it and brought those programs back."

Suburban schools and forecasting

Closures initially affected San Antonio's inner city districts most acutely after the pandemic, and by the end of the last school year, more than 25 campuses closed across four urban, high-poverty districts. But in recent years, school systems in Bexar County's sprawling outskirts and beyond city limits have also shuttered campuses.

In 2024, Judson ISD trustees voted to close Coronado Village Elementary. The district, located in northeast Bexar County across several suburban communities, voted to close four more campuses this school year.

Southwest ISD, located on the city's outer Southwest Side and stretching to remote areas beyond city limits, also opted to close an elementary school in November 2025.

Northside and North East ISDs, the city's two largest school systems, have historically had to plan for population growth in new developments.

Both districts have also benefited from higher property values in their boundaries, which, in addition to the number of students in class each day, plays into how much funding a school system receives. Yet the looming possibility of future closures has hung over those districts, too.

North East ISD, which enrolls about 55,000 students, shuttered three schools in 2025, and this year, Northside ISD began discussing the possibility of consolidating campuses in the coming years. The district is currently studying how to "optimize" resources and may discuss closures at the end of this year.

NEISD leaders also have said the district needs to close more schools in the coming years and will consider factors such as a campus enrolling fewer than 450 students, campus usage below 60% or operational costs that exceed district averages by 5% or more.

"Hope is not a strategy, so we wouldn't lean into that," Superintendent Anthony Jarrett said. "We would really put our heads together and talk about what potentially could happen to the buildings and start doing our legwork sooner (rather) than later."

North East ISD has repurposed one of its three closed schools as a training center for the Bexar County Sheriff's Department. The other two closed campuses are being used for other district purposes. The district is hoping to find enough willing and appropriate partners to take over schools slated for future campus closures. That will likely be a challenge.

"Schools are built to educate kids, they're not built for commercial real estate," Jarrett said. "And so the challenge is, even if you wanted to sell a building, who wants to buy it?"

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This story was originally published July 12, 2026 at 11:13 AM.