DUVAL COUNTY, Fla. – The Duval County public school landscape could look very different in the next few years. Two dozen schools are on the chopping block or could be consolidated.
The goal is to help close a $1.4 billion budget gap for the state’s sixth-largest district.
The need for change goes back to enrollment being down with parents choosing to send their children to private and charter schools. The district has lost about 30,000 students over the last 10 years.
A plan under consideration for Duval County Public Schools, which is not a done deal, could affect more than a dozen schools in the county, many in Arlington or the Beaches.
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In Arlington, some of the schools around Terry Parker High, including Grasp Academy, Brookview Elementary, Holiday Hill Elementary, Fort Caroline Elementary, Lake Lucina Elementary, Lone Star Elementary, Parkwood Heights Elementary, and Arlington Elementary could all be closed under the new proposal and merged into new schools.
Under the proposal now being considered by the school, Atlantic Beach Elementary School would also close and students would instead go to Neptune Beach Elementary, about a mile away, which would then become a K-8 school.
At the Beaches, the district is also considering closing:
- Seabreeze Elementary and San Pablo Elementary and moving those students to Fletcher Middle School
- Fletcher Middle would then convert to a K-8 school
- Students at Anchor Academy and Mayport Elementary would move to Mayport Middle, which would also become a new K-8
The changes were recommended by consultants hired by the district.
“What we did was we actually asked the consultant to come up with any and every possibility to make sure we can create the most resources for our schools,” said Duval County School Board Chair Darryl Willie.
They looked at the optimal school size and found:
- An efficient elementary school should have 800 students
- For K-8 schools it should be 1,100 to 1,500 students
- For middle schools, it’s about 1,200 students
- And High schools should have about 2,400 students
When students leave their neighborhood schools they take the money with them, so if a school doesn’t have the optimal enrollment, it’s costing more to run than what it’s bringing in.
In 2019, there were 157 schools in the district, with nearly 111,000 students. These schools were on average at 82% capacity. That is not the case anymore with more charter school options and vouchers for students to attend private schools.
Willie said history also plays a factor.
“We have a lot of schools, but a lot of that goes all the way back into history where some students, Black students and white students, couldn’t always go to school together -- so you see neighborhoods that have multiple schools in that environment,” Willie said. “This has been a long time coming.”
In total, more than two dozen schools could be affected in all parts of Duval County.
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Willie said there are many steps to go through before any decisions are made about school closures or consolidations. He said before they move forward at all they would need a recommendation from interim Superintendent Dr. Dana Kriznar, which hasn’t been made yet.
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“At the end of the day, we always look for community input before we make any decisions,” Willie said. “So we would take this plan, any plan, out into the community -- every part of the community -- so they actually see the plan and understand it and give any feedback or reactions to it. So, at this point, we’re not making any decisions. No decisions have been made. And even if we were, those decisions would not be made until the fall of next year. So the implementation of that would not happen until the following year.”
The school board did approve the consolidation of R.L. Brown and R.V. Daniels elementary schools earlier this week. That was a separate case where each school had fewer than 200 students.