On Monday, the Duval County School Board will decide whether to close a number of schools, mostly on Jacksonville’s Westside. On Tuesday, voters in the same area will help pick a new District 5 school board representative.

Jacksonville Today asked the two District 5 candidates their thoughts on school closures in the district they want to represent. The candidates are running to replace term-limited Warren Jones, who is finishing his second four-year term.

Hank Rogers is the chief operating officer at a local education nonprofit, and Reggie Blount is a U.S. Army veteran who adjuncts at Florida State College at Jacksonville. In August’s primary election, a third candidate, Nahshon Nicks, took about 20% of the vote, forcing Blount and Rogers into a November runoff.

“The community has already said, ‘Hey, fix what’s broken over here first,’ and the district has not done that,” Rogers told Jacksonville Today. “I think we’re creating these proposals without listening to what the community is saying to us.”

Rogers says one of his concerns with the current school closure plan is that there’s no guarantee the displaced students will go where the district zones them. Faced with the loss of a neighborhood school they can walk to, Rogers suspects many families may send their kids to charter schools instead.

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“Parents have spoken with their feet and went to other places, and so at the end of the day, what I have witnessed, and historically has happened, the parents don’t go with the district recommendation,” Rogers tells Jacksonville Today.

Anecdotally, the district’s schools in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods don’t offer the same kinds of enrichment programs seen at schools in more affluent areas — programs that might keep children at their zoned schools, or even draw students from other areas. 

“We need to figure out how to fix it and not close schools,” Rogers says. “We need to figure out what programs we need to put into our schools. There’s a lot that I think the district needs to figure out.”

Blount tells Jacksonville Today he is “extremely concerned about the closings,” but he declined to comment further for this story because “the process is still being worked out.”

A district in flux

The school district has known for some time that it must make extreme cuts to its budget for the upcoming school year — to the tune of more than $100 million — and with many schools drastically under-enrolled, it says school consolidations and closures are necessary. 

Exactly which schools should close, though, has proven a thorny question. 

The School Board is set to imminently vote on the closure of six elementary schools and a middle school magnet program at the end of the current school year, four of which are in District 5. All serve mostly non-white and economically disadvantaged families. 

Duval Schools administrators said they chose the six elementary schools because they are each small enough to entirely fold into another nearby school — creating “one thriving school” from two. The schools’ supporters and community advocates are leery of asking the Westside to again endure schools’ closing. 

Outgoing District 5 representative Warren Jones said that in his eight years on the board, seven schools in his district closed.

“The community is very under-enrolled. The parents understand the need to consolidate,” Jones said. “But this process should not be driven solely by economics…We need to have a concern and care for those parents who have invested in our community. They’re committed to the neighborhood schools, they’re committed to DCPS — and we don’t want to in any way, shape or form, discourage them or dishonor them.”

All of the schools on the closure list have charter schools just as close — if not closer — than the new zoned school. 

“We cannot assume that parents will just move to the new school,” District 3 school board member Cindy Pearson said at the public hearing. “I hope they will, because we’re going to make a place for them to be there, but we know that they have all kinds of options in the community.”

Already, many students in the district make that choice. 

About 18% of the district’s 129,000 registered students attend publicly funded, privately operated charter schools. At the schools being considered for closure, a high percentage of students also attend a different traditional DCPS school than the one they are zoned for. 

In contrast, at schools that do not struggle with under-enrollment, like Fishweir Elementary and John Stockton Elementary, some students still attend charter schools, but they tend not to choose different traditional DCPS schools at the same high rate. 

Earlier this year, the closure list included schools with high percentages of more affluent, white students. Their parents mobilized quickly and effectively advocated for their schools to remain open.

“I am concerned that the loudest communities are getting what they want, and in Arlington maybe I don’t have 300 people lining out the door, but that doesn’t mean that these schools mean any less to the city,” District 1 board member Kelly Coker said at the public hearing. “ I just don’t want closures to happen on the backs of some of our most vulnerable communities.”