School closures in Akron Public Schools are nothing new.
As enrollment has shifted over the decades, the district has shuttered dozens of buildings, combined schools, constructed new ones and redrawn attendance boundaries to meet those changing needs.
But those closures can leave scars: vacant, blighted properties; neighborhoods without schools and, by extension, less investment; and hurt feelings when a beloved institution is no more.
Judi Hill, president of the Akron NAACP and a former APS teacher and administrator, has seen the impact of those changes firsthand. When Erie Island Elementary closed in the mid-2000s, it was because the population around the West Akron school had changed and, when the final bell rang, there were only about 150 students left.
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Follow the full story: Read more about why there may be APS school closures and the possible consolidation of neighborhood schools.
“It forever changes the neighborhood,” Hill said of school closures. “It’s almost like you have houses there and not homes. Because that feeder — that one place that everyone was familiar with — is gone.”
As Akron Public Schools looks at its building footprint compared to enrollment trends — and the possibility of consolidating buildings in the near future — Hill and others hope the district considers the historical impact of prior closures.
Hill feels prior closures were strategic in “trying to get all sides of town,” but, she said, they tended to be in areas with lower enrollment — and, by extension, lower economic investment.
Some of those schools were located on Akron’s west side – including West Akron, Sherbondy Hill, Summit Lake and Kenmore: Lane and Margaret Park elementaries. Thornton and Perkins junior high schools. South and Kenmore high schools.
And others: Central-Hower High School. Lincoln, Erie Island, Crosby and Smith elementaries.
But schools on the east side were not immune: Goodyear and Goodrich middle schools. Hotchkiss and Barrett elementaries.
Enrollment in Akron Public Schools has declined for decades. When Hill started her teaching career at Voris Elementary in the 1979-80 school year, there were nearly 39,000 students — almost double the number of students enrolled during the 2025-26 school year.
APS lost thousands of students over the years as fewer families lived in the city; they open enroll their children in neighboring districts or use private school vouchers.
Fewer students means less state funding, a fact driving a recent $11 million budget reduction for the 2026-27 school year and pending discussions on further cuts to keep the district’s budget in the black. As the school district faces a potential $37 million deficit in the 2028-29 school year, the prospect of closing buildings — though not yet officially under discussion – looms overhead.
“We definitely need to do it,” Board Member Greg Harrison said of consolidating APS buildings. “But how do you do it and make sure that every school cluster, every neighborhood, has the resources to keep its own schools vibrant?”
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Innerbelt project brought disinvestment
Several of those shuttered schools were in the same neighborhoods impacted by the Innerbelt project in the 1960s and ‘70s — the same neighborhoods that had been redlined decades prior.
State Route 59’s construction, part of a burgeoning urban renewal effort across the United States, sliced through historic Black communities, demolishing housing and driving investment out of the area. Losing cultural centers, businesses and adequate housing to the concrete thoroughfare, many families left their west side neighborhoods — taking their school-age children with them.
Some families, Hill said, relocated to South Akron, and others moved closer to West Akron’s Erie Island Elementary.
Akron’s West Hill neighborhood lost Grace Elementary and West Junior High School in the late 1970s. Nearby, Sherbondy Hill’s Lane Elementary and South High School all closed in the early 1980s. On the other side of state Route 59, residents closer to downtown Akron lost Henry and Howe elementaries in the late 1970s.
An effort is now underway to reconnect the previously harmed communities through public investment.
Some school closures were at the core of a 1978 lawsuit alleging recent or proposed school closures disproportionately impacted majority-Black school buildings, including the closure of Robinson Elementary and South High School (which was proposed, but not in effect at the time of the lawsuit). An Ohio district court found the closures were unconstitutional based on students’ race, but the ruling was overturned on appeal.
“We can’t just look at fixing what we see as a problem right now,” Harrison said. “We have to look at it and make sure that we’re not going to have unintended, negative impacts in 15 years because we [choose] to do it today …
“It seems that some areas — and I’ll be frank — poor, Black neighborhoods, have been impacted adversely the most,” Harrison continued. “That’s why we have to make sure we have plans, that we talk about the unintended consequences, we talk about what closing or consolidating a school will do to the neighborhood.”
Closing a school can kill a community, he said — which is what made the school construction project in Kenmore so important.
Kenmore construction project looks to mend fences
As APS considers shrinking its footprint, it has two major construction projects underway:
- The new Miller South and Pfeiffer Elementary campus on the former Kenmore High School site.
- The pending construction of a new North High School — as that cluster continues to grow.
Kenmore High School merged with Garfield High School leading up to the 2017-18 school year. It marked the latest in a series of closures and consolidations that left the neighborhood with only four of its original school buildings — and residents who felt disconnected from their city and community.
Residents in Kenmore previously told Signal Akron that taking away the high school there hit the community hard, but the $76 million project to combine the new Pfeiffer Elementary School and Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts is a glimmer of hope.
Blighted properties attract negative attention
Carla Chapman knows the lasting impact school consolidations can leave on a community: She grew up next to a blighted elementary school.
Lane Elementary for decades educated Sherbondy Hill students at the corner of Howe Street and Moeller Avenue. Thousands of children passed through its tiled hallways and learned to read and write in its maze of classrooms — but by the time Chapman was in high school, the property had become a long-vacant eyesore.
“It became a site of vandalism, negative behavior, crime — it was horrible waking up and looking at that every day,” said Chapman, now Akron Public Schools’ chief of community relations and strategic engagement. “It doesn’t give you a very good thought about the importance of education or what other people who have the power to do something thought about education in our community.”
Chapman graduated from St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in 1981 after leading the girl’s basketball team to back-to-back State Championships in her junior and senior years. She attended The Ohio State University and later coached basketball at Akron’s Garfield High School. She was inducted into the Ohio Basketball Hall of Fame in 2025.
Her neighborhood was not alone in grappling with that reality. Those living near the long-shuttered South High School, Smith Elementary School, Goodrich Middle School and others know the crime the vacant properties attract, the feeling of a hulking, decaying space waiting for a new buyer while time — and the freeze and thaw of Northeast Ohio winters — take their toll.
Sometimes, those buildings find new life as apartments. Others eventually meet a wrecking ball.
Central-Hower closure ‘lost a legacy’
Kateri Hargrove does not know the fate of her beloved alma mater, Central-Hower High School.
When she walked across the stage at graduation in 1988, it never occurred to her that her high school could one day be vacant — there were 350 kids in her graduating class and eight high schools in the city. It was the same property, though an updated building, that her grandmother had graduated from when it was Central High School in the 1940s.
“It just lost a legacy,” Hargrove said of the building, which closed at the end of the 2005-06 school year. Central-Hower marked the second Akron public school she attended that closed during her lifetime — Hargrove previously attended Goodyear Middle School, which was demolished last year.
“I wasn’t going to be able to have a kid go to the same high school I went to and graduated from.”
She remembered touring the building for a class reunion. The distinct architecture remained the same, but everything felt smaller to her as an adult walking through the chemistry lab and cafeteria where she once met students from Laos and Vietnam.
Hargrove open enrolled from the East Cluster to Central-Hower to take advantage of its health science programs.
Those demolitions speak to the city’s decline, she said, and decisions taxpayers have little say in when it comes to which schools consolidate.
“I would hope they would try to preserve as much of the history of the schools as possible,” she said. “Once you merge [schools], that’s a different trajectory.”
Central-Hower was sold to the University of Akron in 2012 and housed APS’ STEM High School until the program relocated to Robinson Community Learning Center in 2024.
Hill: Reality must be kept in mind
Hill worked in Akron Public Schools from its desegregation efforts through busing in the late 1970s to school consolidations and the construction of community learning centers that started in the early 2000s until her retirement in 2011.
Ever constant was the ebb and flow of budget cycles.
It also becomes a matter of legacy left behind, she said — not just for the graduates who can no longer see their family walk the same school hallways as they did but for the historical figures whose names are imprinted in the brick facades of Lane and Lincoln elementaries, Roswell Kent Middle School and others.
“Clearly, the emotional attachment has to be considered,” Hill said, “but there’s also some realities we have to [keep in mind].”
