New Orleans school district expects more closures, consolidations in coming years as enrollment declines

By Safura Syed

Contributing Writer

(Veritenews.org) – The Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) needs to close or consolidate at least seven schools in the next few years to meet its efficiency goals, according to a school system analysis by New Schools of New Orleans (NSNO), especially as declining enrollment strains the NOLA Public School district’s budget.

New Orleans’ shrinking population – due to low birth rates and migration out of the city — also means that there are fewer children entering the school system. That poses a problem for public schools, whose enrollment numbers are directly tied to their funding. By putting more students into one school building, district leaders say they can provide more resources and combat the financial strain of low enrollment by employing economies of scale.

“If you want schools to receive more money, you have to make them more efficient,” said OPSB member Olin Parker during a Tuesday board meeting. “You have to have more students enrolled in those campuses. That’s the financial reality, unless somebody can make money magically appear.”

Over the coming months the board, with input from charter school leaders, will draft a new district optimization policy, which will outline ways to make the system more efficient by supporting transitions and consolidations. Maxwell Daigh, the chief of data, accountability and portfolio at NOLA Public Schools, said the district should consider academic quality, facility conditions, enrollment, finances and community impact when making decisions on the future of schools.

“We’re at the point where there’s no low-hanging fruit,” Daigh said. “These are going to be hard discussions.”

Enrollment in the city’s public schools steadily declined between 2019 to 2023. It increased slightly in 2024, but declined again last year according to NSNO’s analysis of state data. In 2025, around 44,000 students were enrolled in public schools in New Orleans, down about 10 percent from 49,000 in 2019. Schools around the country are experiencing dropping enrollment, but the rate of decline in New Orleans is moderately higher than a nationwide estimate of about eight percent

Most New Orleans public schools are around 90 percent full, according to the NSNO analysis. But the district hopes to bump that up to 92 percent by the start of the 2029-2030 school year. That means that the number of available seats has to decrease. NSNO estimates that the district will have to remove over 3,800 empty K-8 seats and 1,600 high school ones to meet its goals, equivalent to closing five to six K-8 schools and two to three high schools.

Holly Reid, NSNO’s chief of policy and portfolio, who presented the analysis to the board during the Tuesday meeting, said that the loss of pandemic relief funds, uncertainty in local and federal funding policy and declining enrollment mean that schools face financial challenges well outside of the district’s direct control. Another source of financial strain on the district is its school buildings, some of which are old and deteriorating, requiring higher maintenance and operational costs.

“We have to figure out how to use our dollars better,” Reid said.

Although systemwide enrollment is dropping, most individual schools that remain open have a higher percentage of filled seats, Reid said. She said that was thanks to the closure of three high schools between the 2025-2026 school year, which put around 650 students into other high schools, boosting enrollment at the schools that remained open. By gradually increasing enrollment and fill rates, schools can find a sweet spot where operations and staffing costs remain steady, while increasing per-student budgets.

This school year, two New Orleans high schools – New Harmony High School and Sarah T. Reed High School – have voluntarily relinquished their charters and are slated to close at the end of the school year. Einstein Charter Schools, which operates Sarah T. Reed, also elected to consolidate three of its lower schools into one preschool-8th grade campus. The consolidation should help address some of the underenrollment in New Orleans East, according to NSNO’s analysis. The analysis says that schools in New Orleans East and Uptown have lower percentages of filled seats than those in Mid-City, downriver areas and the West Bank.

The district optimization plan currently only applies to its charter schools, which make up all but one of the schools in the city. NOLA Public Schools Superintendent Fateama Fulmore said the board will work on creating a complimentary policy for the district’s only traditionally-run school, The Leah Chase School, which was recently at risk of closing due to budget concerns stemming from underenrollment this school year.

“We don’t want anybody to assume that any district optimization of our schools will result in a transition to the district direct-running schools,” Fulmore said. “District optimization is for the entire system. It is not unique to a governance model.”

This article originally published in the March 2, 2026 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.