The Duval County School Board will vote Monday whether to close two more elementary schools: the urban core’s 108-year-old Long Branch Elementary and Anchor Academy, which serves many military families stationed at Mayport.
Officials say the district has 30,000 unfilled seats and they need school closures in order to “right-size” the district — in other words, to operate with enough students to break even with state funding. The district has too many small schools, Superintendent Christopher Bernier says in an oft-repeated slide presentation, and each school needs at least 700 students to recoup the cost of keeping the doors open.
While those reasons have remained consistent, the language that Bernier uses while talking about the financial urgency of school closures has done something of a 180 — from needing to fill a $100 million budget hole to “truly balancing” the budget a year later — though the savings from school closures do not come close to $100 million…