Nearly three decades ago, Akron Public Schools served more than 30,000 students.
This school year, Akron schools served just under 20,000 students — and the school district is projected to lose another 2,000 kids by the end of the decade as the city’s population continues to decline and families opt for other education options.
With funding tied largely to enrollment, every student the cash-strapped district loses can mean less money for classrooms, staff and services. That’s why Akron school board member Phil Montgomery believes consolidating buildings is “probably inevitable.”
“When we go down this road,” Montgomery said, “no one wants their neighborhood school impacted. But we will have no choice.”
School closings would likely coincide with staffing or program cuts.
It’s not known what buildings education leaders may consider shuttering, or if Akron closings will be based on enrollment, building age and condition or capacity. Pending discussions around school consolidations will take place in the wake of $11 million in cuts to the 2026-27 school year and even more substantial budget reductions on the horizon.
Superintendent Mary Outley said Akron schools will look to Cleveland Metropolitan Schools’ recent closures for guidance, which took into account school enrollment and building age when it consolidated 39 schools and closed 18 buildings at the end of this school year.
“We can’t rush this,” Outley said, noting that when past consolidations took place years ago in APS, community input was key. “[I] think we would look at past practices that we found successful that we would want to bring into this new age.”
For the 2025-26 school year, APS operated schools in more than 40 buildings throughout the city, with the vast majority of those built in the past 20 years as community learning centers. The district will have to look at how the state and local legislation surrounding CLCs impact school consolidations.
Akron Public Schools is far from alone in balancing budgets with bricks and mortar. National public school enrollment has been in decline for nearly a decade — from more than 50.6 million in 2019 to 49.3 million in 2024. Public schools districts in Philadelphia, Boston, Houston and Chicago have shuttered schools to right-size their footprints to fit budget constraints.
Meanwhile, Ohio’s public school enrollment has dwindled since the mid-2000s.
Future APS budget reductions will be ‘data driven’
Akron Public Schools faces a looming $37 million deficit for the 2028-29 school year, according to its most recent financial forecast. Every year leading up to it, it is spending more money than it receives in state and local funding — necessitating future cuts.
In May, members of the Akron Board of Education approved eliminating 17 positions and trimming spending on contracted services and supply costs.
“Right now we’re still trying to make it through $11 million in cuts,” said school board president Barbara Sykes. “We know next year we’re going to have to cut more than twice as much and that is going to mean that all options are on the table — and all options will absolutely include looking at buildings.
“We have to be realistic about this.”
If schools were to close, state law requires public schools to offer unused facilities for sale or lease to charter schools — which could further siphon students from APS classrooms.
But APS could repurpose buildings to serve students with special needs normally transported outside its boundaries for service — like Mentor Public Schools’ CARES school for students with autism — or transfer properties to the city to use as community centers.
“We have to be very open, honest and transparent,” Montgomery said. “It has got to be data driven. … It is, ‘Where are the students, where are the buildings and what makes sense to meet our budgetary needs?”
North Hill population boom supports construction project
While APS grapples with dwindling enrollment, it is also juggling two major construction projections: A new North High School and combining Miller South and Pfeiffer Elementary onto one campus.
The $85 million North High School project, slated to open for the 2029-30 school year, will serve 1,100 students in grades 9-12. The current building, built in 1931, was constructed to serve 900 students — and is overcrowded as the neighborhood around it grows due to an influx of immigrants into North Hill.
Akron schools also recently approved a redistricting plan to relieve overcrowding at North Hill’s Jennings Community Learning Center by moving a portion of its students to Kenmore’s Innes Community Learning Center.
Meanwhile, in Akron’s Kenmore neighborhood, work is underway on a $76 million project to relocate Pfeiffer Elementary and Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts to the site of the neighborhood’s former high school. In 2017, Kenmore High School combined with Garfield High School.
Suggested Reading
The bulk of the Kenmore project is paid through a certificate of participation — essentially a $40 million loan — alongside leftover funds from prior construction projects and general fund dollars.
Voters approved a 1.3-mill bond issue for North High School’s construction in November 2024 as part of Issue 27, a ballot measure to support the school’s construction and an operating levy to help momentarily stave off a budget deficit.
It was the first Akron school levy passed in 12 years. Without it, APS faced a deficit as soon as fiscal year 2027. With the levy’s passage, that financial cliff was pushed off for another two years.
Passing that levy in 2024 was not a guarantee — and asking for new money from Akron residents again may be a challenge. Neighboring districts had little success in passing levies earlier this year. Barberton, Norton, Tallmadge and Twinsburg school districts all saw voters reject income and property tax issues.
Prior Akron school closures were ‘emotional’
At one point, APS served students in 100 buildings, said Debra Foulk, executive director of business affairs — but its high enrollment at the time supported those overhead costs. For the 1977-78 school year (the earliest enrollment data available from the state), APS served more than 45,000 students.
When Akron Schools celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1997, it listed 18 closed or consolidated buildings in its historical lookback “What’s in a name?” — from West High School and Hower Vocational to Lane and Grace elementaries. For the 1996-97 school year, APS served about 32,000 students.
More recently, a district-wide restructuring closed Firestone Park Elementary in 2024, sending students to McEbright, Glover and Coris community learning centers.
Throughout those prior consolidations and redistricting efforts, school staff have hosted meetings in impacted neighborhoods to keep families informed, Outley said — and she plans to keep the practice going moving forward.
“Things were still emotional because if you hear you’re going to close your school, you’re going to be emotional, but it allowed us to keep a pulse,” she said. Separate from talks of school consolidations, Outley hosted a listening tour earlier this year to discuss the district’s challenges outside of Akron Board of Education meetings.
Because APS has neighborhood schools, there are more elementary buildings than middle and high schools scattered across the city — and the number of students served by each of those buildings varies based on where the school is and how many students it was built to serve.
Capacity on paper versus the space for students in individual buildings can differ, Outley said, as those Ohio Facilities Construction Commission guidelines do not take into account smaller classroom units like those serving students with significant emotional or behavioral needs.
In June, the Akron Board of Education will look at a temporary budget for fiscal year 2027 and vote on a permanent one for the year in September. The board will have “homework to do” this summer, said Montgomery, the school board member.
Ultimately, Montogomery said, it will all come down to answering this question: “What does closing one building save us?”
