On a mild Thursday morning in January 2023, I met Nadia Combs for coffee at The Attic in downtown Tampa. At the time, the Hillsborough County School Board was wrangling over a controversial plan to shutter underused schools. Combs, the board chairperson, was urging her colleagues to strike deep, arguing that closing only a handful would get the system nowhere.
“That won’t buy us five years,” she told me. “Probably not even three.”
Combs’ guestimate was wrong, but her instincts were right. The school board’s decision that May to close six schools didn’t buy Hillsborough another five years to confront its glut of empty classrooms. It didn’t even buy three. In fact, in 2024, the first year the full closure plan took effect, Hillsborough had the same number of schools (83) operating at or below 70% capacity as it did in 2022, when discussions about closings first got underway. Fourteen schools last year were half-full or less, barely better than the 16 half-empty schools before the closures. Another 28 had enrollments in the 50% range…