During a five-hour Broward County School Board workshop meeting Tuesday night to address school repurposing, the board told the superintendent to go back to the drawing board.
“We have 54,000 unused seats and every year it grows,” said board member Dr. Allen Zeman.
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WATCH HEREHe described the problem in a nutshell, but the school board rejected Superintendent Dr. Howard Hepburn’s phase one plan to deal with under-enrollment as not bold enough and not big enough.
“I don’t like that this is kicking the can down the road,” said board member Torey Alston during the meeting.
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“We’re acting like Kodak when digital cameras came out,” Zeman added.
So after raising objections to Hepburn’s first plan last week, which included closing three schools, the board asked him to come back in two weeks with a plan that included closing up to eight schools as soon as the 2025-26 school year.
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In a one-on-one interview today, I asked Hepburn if he could tell me any schools that might be closed.
“Not at this point. We’re going out to the communities, with specific problems that are unique to them and start talking about solutions, and some of that will include school closures,” he responded. “We know we’re in an environment where parents have choice, and we have to compete, we have to do better than we’re doing now and offer something innovative that parents want to see in their schools.”
I asked him what he’d like to see happen right now to lure kids back to district schools.
“Right now, I would like to see us move forward with the reconfigurations and full choice, and then waiting on the board to give me specific feedback on consensus of the next steps that the board wants staff to start implementing soon,” Hepburn responded.
Reconfiguration includes, for example, turning Pines Middle into a 6-12 school and creating more full-choice magnet schools. These are popular concepts, but how will they sell shutting schools down?
“You have more opportunities, you have more programs, you have student special interest opportunities, you can do more because you have more students concentrated in one school,” Hepburn said, making the claim that consolidating the student bodies of two or three schools is better for the students.
Hepburn said the district will rely on enrollment data, demographic trends, and the numbers of kids in specific areas going to private and charter schools. The superintendent says the decisions on school closures will be data-driven, not driven by emotion.
