Community weighs in on potential Broward school closures
Anabelle Rivera moved from Miami Shores to Weston in 2021 in hopes that a Broward public school could help her autistic son. She had tried three private schools in Miami-Dade and disliked them all.
“To my surprise it was better,” she said. “We are in a much better place now, but it took a lot of work. It took a lot of conversations between me as an interested and informed parent and staff.”
Then recently, the mom of a seventhgrader at Tequesta Trace Middle School found out the Broward school district will close or repurpose at least five of its 239 schools in the 2025-26 school year. She decided to attend a Thursday community meeting hosted by the school district to discuss those plans.
Rivera was one of about 75 people who went in person to J.P. Taravella High School in Coral Springs; about 50 others tuned in online.
The event was the second of three. The first took place Feb. 8 at Fort Lauderdale High School and attracted about 150 people in person and about 200 others online. The last event is planned for 6 p.m. this upcoming Thursday at Charles W. Flanagan High School in Pembroke Pines.
Like the first event, Broward Schools Superintendent Peter Licata began Thursday with a presentation that explained the district must change because it has lost about 58,000 students in the past 20 years. After, the attendees were divided into five groups and sent to classrooms.
In the small breakout group that Rivera was in, about 20 people sat in a semicircle. Two facilitators asked questions and led the discussion, using an artificialintelligence surveying program called ThoughtExchange.
They first asked a question about the challenges and opportunities that come with closing or repurposing schools.
Rivera, the mother of the autistic son, said she hopes the district adds more resources for students with disabilities. She also said she has a daughter who is a senior at a Wynwood charter school that focuses on the arts and has thrived there because she has developed her singing.
Rivera said Broward public schools should replicate that program in all fields. “I’m hopeful,” she said. A woman said the district will struggle to regain the public’s trust, an issue largely rooted in a failed 2014 taxpayer-approved $800 million project to fix schools. Another woman said it would be a problem if people lose their jobs in the process.
Aiykiera Brown, a senior at Millennium Collegiate Academy in Tamarac, said she worried students’ mental health would suffer if they were removed from their comfort zones and separated from their friends.
“You could have a lot of students drop out,” she said.
Then facilitators repeated the two questions from the first event on ThoughtExhange.
First: “When the District decides to close or combine schools, what should we think about the most. What considerations are most important and why?”
Those answers largely led the group to wonder why students were leaving in the first place. A woman worried that if the district doesn’t identify the underlying causes and fix them, repurposing or closing some schools would be a “Band-Aid solution.”
“So then the plan is what? To keep closing schools?” she said.
Joi Calderon, the mother of a junior at J.P. Taravella and an eighth-grader at Ramblewood Middle in Coral Springs, agreed with that. She wondered if the Broward school district has looked at charter and private schools and analyzed why people are choosing those over the traditional public schools.
“Is it a community thing? Is it a cultural thing?
Is it a location thing? I don’t know,” she said. “But let’s look at the root causes, because if not we’re going to keep losing students.”
Calderon also said the district should set ways to measure success quickly in each of its decisions. Whether the district decides to close a school, combine two under-enrolled schools, convert part of a school to provide another service, such as a technical education, change the school-attendance zone or implement any other idea, the district should monitor how that’s going and pivot with agility if needed, she said.
“How are they going to reassess, and how are they going to make decisions to say, ‘Yes, we need to move forward with this’ or ‘No, we need to retract it. Let’s try this instead?’ ” she said.
The second question that facilitators asked the group — “How can we make changing schools a positive experience for students, teachers, and the community to help our schools become the best they can be?” — elicited some ideas.
A man suggested the school district hold more meetings in low-income neighborhoods to reach people who might not have been able to travel to the three designated locations. Or alternatively, he said, the district could offer free transportation to the last event.
Another man said he once worked for the school district as a lawn-maintenance operator and knows the district owns a lot of land. He wondered if instead of spending money on constantly cutting grass and maintaining empty lots, the district could sell or lease them.
“You know what 50 acres can go for?” he said. “3.4 million.”