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How two districts used a student-centered strategy while addressing underused facilities

Like many school district leaders across the country, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, former superintendent of Hartford Public Schools in Connecticut, has faced the turmoil that comes with declining enrollment, a significant budget deficit and school closures. Tracy Dorland, her counterpart in Jefferson County Public Schools in Golden, Colo., braved similarly hard times.

Driven by a commitment to improve the lives of more students, both Torres-Rodriguez and Dorland view these leadership struggles as opportunities to create better schools.

These days, too many schools have too few students, which means not enough resources to offer the kind of robust, enriching experiences students deserve. In our nonprofit organization鈥檚 consulting work with hundreds of school districts, we hear this observation with increasing frequency. In a 2024 network convening with various district leaders, we spoke with Torres-Rodriguez and Dorland, who each reflected on previous experience with strategic portfolio change as a critical way to address this challenge.

According to Torres-Rodriguez, who ended her tenure with the 2024-25 school year, Hartford, with a capacity at one time for 95,000 students, had seen a 10 percent decline in enrollment in the five years prior to the 2017-18 school year. Leaders ended up closing four schools between 2018 and 2021, reconfiguring grade levels in 12 others and relocating eight schools.

Likewise, before its restructuring plan took place beginning in 2021-22, Jeffco served 25,600 students across 85 elementary schools, well below its capacity of 39,000 at the time. The district subsequently closed 16 elementaries at the end of 2022-23. Today, declining enrollment trends have continued for both districts.

Community Engagement

Hartford Public Schools and Jeffco Public Schools are two districts that have had a long relationship with our organization, Education Resource Strategies. They are models highlighting the power of community-driven, student-centered portfolios to address significant enrollment declines and the resulting underutilization of school facilities.

Between 2018 and 2023, Torres-Rodriguez and Dorland made decisions about closing and consolidating schools for their districts through a three-part continuous improvement process that can be summarized in three words: envision, explore and evaluate.

Faced with difficult choices, Torres-Rodriguez engaged the community in more than 100 public sessions to understand how they defined an excellent school. Similarly, Jeffco leaders hosted more than 50 community engagement sessions to inform families of the tradeoffs to maintaining the status quo, to gather feedback on potential consolidations and to get input on how the district could best support students and families through the transition process, according to the district鈥檚 February 2023 report 鈥淩egional Opportunities for Thriving Schools: After Action Review Part I.鈥�

As Hartford and Jeffco worked to increase the number of excellent schools in their districts while addressing declining enrollment, this deep engagement helped ensure they consistently anchored their portfolio decisions in the community鈥檚 needs.

Transparency Foremost

How leaders manage significant change matters just as much as the change itself. An effective process for managing decline doesn鈥檛 start with a closure list but rather with a commitment to students, a respect for community voice and a transparent, data-backed strategy.

Before the pandemic, enrollment patterns forced Torres-Rodriguez and Dorland to rethink how they could deliver equitable learning experiences. Changes to school facility portfolios were incredibly hard, yet each had several years of district leadership under their belts at the time and knew that ignoring the problem would make matters worse. So they committed to leading with transparency and care to create fewer, better-resourced schools to serve as a step toward a stronger overall system.

Transparent communication during community engagement sessions helped parents understand why changes were needed and how they helped more students succeed. Looking back on this work during a 2024 panel in front of dozens of other district leaders, Torres-Rodriguez reflected: 鈥淚 wanted to be able to say, 鈥楳s. Martinez, you told me you wanted X for your child. This is where it lives in the plan and why.鈥欌��

Disproportionate Impact

While districtwide building portfolio decisions are complex and deeply emotional, especially when consolidating or closing schools, these tough decisions can help us protect the promise of public education by ensuring we can provide a high-quality experience to every student in every remaining school. The criteria district leaders develop should actively guide them in exploring new possibilities for how schools are organized 鈥� whether that means rethinking grade-level configurations, expanding programming or considering school consolidations.

Leaders also should recognize the most vulnerable learners tend to feel the greatest impact of these decisions. Research consistently shows school closures disproportionately affect Black students 鈥� often regardless of school size or enrollment trends. During the 2024 district leader convening, Dorland observed that in JeffCo 鈥淢any of the schools with declining enrollment are also schools that serve highly impacted communities. If we let them continue to drop, we鈥檙e exacerbating the equity issue.鈥�

This is a systemic pattern that leaders must actively account for. At the same time, continuing to operate underenrolled schools often means offering less to more students 鈥� fewer electives, fewer counselors, fewer dollars for enrichment.

To make the best decisions for all students while addressing inequities that impact those furthest from opportunity, we need to look forward and backward. We need to have a strong vision for the future of our education system and make decisions anchored in what our students need to thrive. Simultaneously, we need to examine past portfolio decisions and the effect they鈥檝e had on students of color, students with the greatest learning needs and students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Three-Part Process

Leading this work well required Torres-Rodriguez and Dorland to move through three phases, each designed to bring clarity, coherence and shared purpose to what can otherwise feel like a purely technical or political exercise. This phased approach transforms facility-use decisions from a reactive response to declining enrollment into a proactive opportunity to build a stronger, more equitable school system.

Phase 1: Envision

District leaders should anchor portfolio decisions in a clear, student-centered vision that starts by collaborating with educators, families and community members to define what every student in the district needs to thrive. Communities might identify the following:

Strong core academics;

Robust course offerings;

Access to the arts, music and physical education; and

Meaningful opportunities for enrichment and exploration.

By helping educators and families clearly understand the tradeoffs in portfolio redesign decisions, district leaders and their communities can build a strong, sustainable school system.

When redesigning their mix of school facilities, Hartford鈥檚 leaders developed a 鈥淒istrict Model for Excellence鈥� report that included non-negotiable guiding principles for the student and educator experiences. These included intense elementary literacy and numeracy instruction, middle grades programming and high school college preparatory and career development.

Dorland says she once 鈥渨alked into a 1st-grade classroom, and there were five students with one teacher. They [had to] occasionally combine classrooms with the 2nd grade to give the kids some interaction.鈥� To solve this issue, she and Jeffco leaders created a vision for 鈥淎 Thriving Student & Educator Experience,鈥� which highlighted the importance of having one class per grade level, consistent planning time for elementary school teachers and full-time art, music and physical education teachers in each elementary school.

These clearly articulated visions helped the two district leaders make decisions that prioritized the high-quality student and educator experiences.

Phase 2: Explore

Too often, school districts make facility-use decisions based on building conditions, enrollment numbers or their bottom line. These factors are important, but they should be considered relative to what each scenario offers in terms of academic quality, whole-child supports, instructional coherence and educator sustainability.

Hartford leaders leveraged their vision to create criteria, including more enrichment opportunities, better conditions for professional learning and more students in better facilities, to test portfolio changes with the community.

鈥淚 made sure students were co-designing this with me. We created the conditions to have our students say what things could look like in the future,鈥� says Torres-Rodriguez. Their transparent, vision-driven criteria helped leaders evaluate tradeoffs, build trust and ensure portfolio decisions advanced the district鈥檚 goals for student learning.

When exploring different levers, it鈥檚 critical to balance looking forward with a lens for historical implications to avoid perpetuating inequities and support students furthest from opportunity. By carefully assessing past portfolio decisions, leaders can identify actions that might have inadvertently led to inequities or disproportionate impact to certain student groups.

Phase 3: Evaluate

Exploring a wide array of redesign options can help leaders identify those that align with the kinds of learning environments they want to create.

In Hartford, leaders converted some pre-K through 8th-grade schools into two schools: pre-K through 5th grade and 6th through 8th grade. This created larger grade sizes, which improved teacher teaming and more effective pathways through elementary, middle and high school. They also explored co-locating neighborhood and magnet schools and designing more alternative high school programming.

In this phase, leaders ought to share potential changes with the community as portfolio decisions are too consequential to make behind closed doors. By circulating draft scenarios 鈥� labeled as options, not recommendations 鈥� leaders invite authentic community dialogue.

Sharing the tradeoffs, constraints and values behind each option allows stakeholders to weigh in meaningfully, not just react. It also builds collective ownership and surfaces local insights that can improve the quality and feasibility of the final plan.

According to Dorland, Jeffco families expressed concern about traffic safety and limited busing routes related to potential school changes. 鈥淲e responded to this by adding routes to bus transportation and having our operations team figure out effective traffic flow patterns with our city partners,鈥� she says. 鈥淏y listening, we could say, 鈥榃e heard this, and this is what we鈥檙e going to do to address your concern.鈥欌��

This kind of intentional, values-driven engagement fosters trust and invites stakeholders into a shared sense of ownership over the path forward.

Reimagining Possibilities

As student populations shift, districts face difficult choices but also unique opportunities to redesign systems in service of a stronger, more equitable future for today鈥檚 students and future generations. By leading with a clear vision, engaging communities early and testing options with clear criteria transparently, superintendents in Hartford and Jefferson County moved beyond crisis-like responses to a process that centers students and thoughtful transformation.

These decisions matter deeply, not just for today鈥檚 schools but for generations of students to come. The question is not whether to act, but how. As leaders, we must approach these decisions with care, thoughtfully balancing student, family and educator needs and being intentional in our planning, transparent in our engagement and grounded in what鈥檚 best for students.

Above all, we must have the courage to help our communities navigate the complexity of change with empathy, honesty and resolve. In moments like this, leadership isn鈥檛 just about making decisions 鈥� it鈥檚 about shaping the future our students deserve. 

Angela King Smith is a partner at Education Resource Strategies based in Atlanta, Ga.