In 1959, Jacksonville’s Annie R. Morgan Elementary School was bursting at the seams. Parents who came of age in the shadow of war were upset that seven “shabby, wooden” portable classrooms were erected to handle its overflow of students. They said it “resembled an Army camp” and compared the buildings to barracks, The Florida Times-Union reported at the time. The school’s 918 students — Baby Boomers today — called the structures “doghouses.” The school spent most of the 1950s on double sessions, splitting the student body into two groups that attended at different times. 

Built in 1916 as Public School No. 21, Annie R. Morgan today has the opposite problem. With just 199 students, it’s one of nine Duval schools that could close at the end of the current school year and one of about two dozen schools that could close over the next 15 years. Its students would be sent to nearby Biltmore Elementary. 

On Tuesday, the School Board will vote to finalize its updated master facility plan, which determines where to locate new schools, when to consolidate or close older or underutilized schools, and what money to invest in maintaining everything else. The plan that officials will present to the board — currently posted as a draft that could still change last-minute before Tuesday’s meeting — lists capital improvements to pursue over the next 15 years.

Planning ahead

At a board workshop earlier this month, Duval Schools Chief Financial Officer Ron Fagan said the district has about $1.1 billion available to spend on big facilities projects over the next five years. The money comes from a few different sources, including local sales tax revenue that, under a new state law, now has to be split with charter schools at a higher percentage than originally planned. 

In 2020, then-Superintendent Diana Greene helped sell voters on the half-cent sales surtax to help the district make much-needed repairs and build new schools under her so-called “Bold Plan,” a version of the district’s master facility plan that has been on a “strategic pause” for about 18 months for reevaluation. After the pandemic, soaring construction costs meant the original goals were no longer feasible.

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The district’s plan to close Annie R. Morgan and send its students to Biltmore was in the Bold Plan, too. What’s different is that Biltmore was originally going to get a $10.2 million renovation and expansion. Instead, the district plans to spend $7.5 million on “deferred maintenance” — in other words, keep Biltmore functional, but no major improvements in the next 15 years. 

U.S. Census records show that the population of the neighborhood Annie R. Morgan and Biltmore share has been relatively stable in recent years, and enrollment at the schools had also been relatively stable — until a national charter school company opened a K-8 school on the property of the old Jacksonville Kennel Club and less than 2 miles away. In the five-year period that included KIPP Bessie Coleman Academy’s opening and covid, both Annie R. Morgan and Biltmore’s enrollments fell by half. 

The latest master facility plan picks up where the Bold Plan left off — in that there were always going to be schools that had to close — but it includes less cash for construction and it changes the list of schools that could close. 

For example, Englewood and Whitehouse elementary schools, previously slated for new buildings, would now close.

“Englewood Elementary was a week away from putting a shovel in the ground for a groundbreaking ceremony when we had our strategic pause,” District 3 school board member Cindy Pearson said at the recent workshop. “I feel like we are going to have a lot of work to do to explain to that community how they’ve gone from ‘You’re getting a new school’ to ‘Your school no longer exists.’”

According to the draft plan published in advance of Tuesday’s meeting, Englewood is scheduled to close following the 2026-27 school year. The $2 million already spent on design and pre-construction for the now-cancelled building project are considered “sunk costs,” with a $550,000 projected cost to demolish the current building once the school closes.

In the case of Whitehouse, Superintendent Christopher Bernier told the board the district is increasingly concerned about commercial development and traffic near the school. They are recommending consolidating it into Thomas Jefferson Elementary. 

Bernier has said several times in the last few months that a school needs about 700 students to cover its operational costs. According to DCPS records provided to Jacksonville Today, about a third of the district’s 96 elementary schools have a capacity greater than 700, and of those that do, about half have more than 700 students enrolled.

‘Equitably shared’?

Earlier this year, the district invited a consultant to recommend which schools to close. The resulting list — which administrators say was based only on quantitative factors like enrollment and building condition — was not well-received by the public. Parents at small neighborhood schools like Fishweir, Atlantic Beach and Holiday Hill elementaries quickly formed advocacy groups and spent months demanding the district keep them open.

For the most part, they were successful, judging by the latest draft plan.

At the board workshop this month, District 1 board member Kelly Coker, who represents Arlington, with four schools on the current closure list, wondered about the students whose parents didn’t organize to save their schools. “Just because a school community isn’t loud, isn’t sending emails…doesn’t mean that school means less to them. It means the world to them. They just may not have the space to be able to send those emails, to be able to request that community meeting,” she said.

“I need to know that this is equitably shared across all of our districts and truly makes sense regardless of that,” said Coker, before directly asking Bernier what he had specifically done to ensure equity “regardless of all the emails.”

“Neighborhoods may gentrify, they may change, they may improve,” Bernier replied. “There could be huge building in areas, new apartments, new homes. You know, communities change. As a school district we have to be prepared to adjust to that and also deal with the difficult decisions that we’re facing.”

Coker opted not to run for a second term; her seat will soon go to local artist Tony Ricardo, who ran this year with the endorsements of Gov. Ron DeSantis and Moms for Liberty. 

Final focus group

Last Tuesday at the Schultz Center in St. Nicholas, school board members Pearson and Coker quietly observed as district administrators presented a slightly different draft facilities plan to parents and community members representing schools across the district. Closures, the group was reminded, require a three-step process: a meeting with the affected school community, a public hearing and a board vote.

Focus group member Yasmina White told Jacksonville Today that the district struggles to engage the community in a meaningful way. 

“It always relates back to the customer experience that we do not have in Duval County Public Schools,” White said. “We will never be the best district in Florida, let alone the United States, until we address our customer experience with our families and students.”

Late-afternoon meetings on short notice might be difficult for parents to attend, for one thing, she said.

“It gets chalked up to, ‘Well, the parents don’t care — it’s probably good that we’re closing up,’” White said. “No! You just made it at a time they can’t come.”

The beginning of the end

Across the river, a different group of parents sat in the cafeteria at Biltmore Elementary on the same evening. They listened to district officials explain their plans to consolidate Annie R. Morgan into Biltmore.

The meetings aren’t “just informational; there is work for these review groups to do,” a district spokesperson told Jacksonville Today. Annie R. Morgan and Biltmore will meet again on Oct. 8 to continue their work, this time at Annie R. Morgan. Meetings for the other schools facing imminent consolidation and closure are scheduled throughout October.

A public hearing on the first round of closures is scheduled Oct. 29, and the board will vote on them Nov. 4. On Nov. 5, voters will select a new representative for the Westside’s District 5 — where most of next year’s recommended closures are located. Reggie Blount, who has the endorsements of Duval’s Republican Party and Moms for Liberty, is running against Hank Rogers, who has the endorsements of Equality Florida and the Jacksonville chapter of the National Organization for Women.