How to Find More Room for Child Care by Repurposing Public Schools

Declining Public School Enrollment

A combination of historically low fertility rates, population outflow from urban areas by families with young children, and an expansion of school choice policies in multiple states has led to an overall decline in public school enrollment across the country. This decline has accelerated due to a sharp rise in the number of homeschooling students first witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. Even as the country’s overall population grew from 2012 to 2022, the share of children aged 5 to 17 enrolled in public schools declined by about four percentage points, while private and charter school enrollment experienced growth of about two percentage points during the same period. These enrollment declines are not distributed equally across the country; sharper declines have been seen in many major cities.

Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe the public school enrollment decline will be reversed any time soon. In fact, researchers at the National Center for Education Statistics predict a decline in public school enrollment of 2.7 million students between 2022 and 2031. California alone experienced a decline of 420,000 public school students over a recent four-year period and is expected to lose another one million students by 2031.

A lower population of public school students over the long term translates to a reduced need for buildings to house the student population. As federal pandemic relief dollars dry up, school districts are increasingly looking to close schools as a way to realize significant financial savings, primarily due to reduced staff costs.

In just the past year, districts across the country have announced plans to close many public school buildings. In May, the Seattle School Board unanimously approved a proposal to close over a quarter of the district’s nearly 70 elementary schools. Currently, the district is only using about 65 percent of the available space at its elementary school sites. In December, the school board in Jackson, Mississippi, voted to close eight elementary schools. Even Colorado, a state that has experienced population growth every single year for the past 12 years, has not been immune to the trend. Officials in Fort Collins have considered closing five to six elementary schools and Jefferson County officials recently shut down 16 elementary schools due to declining enrollment.

Low Child Care Supply

At the same time that the country is experiencing a reduced need for public elementary school buildings, there remains a dire need for increased child care supply. The number of licensed child care centers rebounded to pre-pandemic levels in 2022, but supply was essentially flat in 2023. Meanwhile, the supply of licensed family child care homes has declined by 12 percent since 2019. This scarcity creates few choices and high levels of stress for families, and it has economic ripple effects: According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an estimated 69,000 employees reported missing work in August due to child care problems, matching an all-time record for that month historically.

With districts looking to save costs by closing underutilized elementary school buildings yet still incurring the costs of maintaining those facilities, child care providers struggling to afford rising commercial rents, and families in dire need of more child care options, it makes sense to consider allowing child care providers to make use of these existing school buildings.

Conversion Examples

The idea of converting unused school buildings into space for child care is not an entirely original one. In England, the ruling Labour Party has proposed just such an idea. Leaders in the party have pledged to create over 100,000 new child care classrooms for young children in response to high demand. More than 3,300 of those facilities are being planned for existing elementary school classrooms across the country that are sitting unused due to falling birth rates. The classroom conversions are expected to cost an average of about US$53,000 each.

Communities in the United States, too, are beginning to demonstrate what a conversion approach looks like. One of the pioneering efforts has occurred in Missoula, Montana. The conversion was spearheaded, starting in 2023, by Missoula Child Care Advantage (MCCA), an initiative of the nonprofit Zero to Five Missoula County, which is a program of the United Way of Missoula County. We spoke to Sally Henkel, the MCCA coordinator, and also reviewed an article on MCCA published by Leah Fabel in The Hechinger Report.

MCCA leveraged a $414,000 state child care infrastructure grant to enter into an agreement with Missoula County Public Schools to take over a wing of an unused school, Cold Springs Elementary School, and offer space to six different child care providers. MCCA raised an additional $200,000 from philanthropy and businesses. Providers are charged a below market-rate fee of $900 a month in rent, utilities, and maintenance (at least half of what they would pay on the open market), and they also gain access to a “shared service alliance” in which the United Way runs centralized enrollment and waiting list management services.

This approach is different from school districts which convert unused elementary schools into district-run pre-K centers, an approach with its own merits. Instead, it is characterized by a nonprofit intermediary purchasing or leasing school building space from the district in order to offer space to community-based child care providers. Missoula is not the only place where this approach is being put into practice. Fabel reports that

In upstate New York, the 2023 closure of a parochial school led to the creation of the Ticonderoga Community Early Learning Center, set to open in September to 50 children, age 5 and under. In Texas, the United Way of Greater Austin expects to invest more than $18 million over at least two years to transform the shuttered Pease Elementary into a child care center for more than 100 children, ages 6 months to 5 years, as well as community spaces to be used for events like parent classes and continuing education for early childhood educators.

And in Portland, Indiana, 95 miles northeast of Indianapolis, crews are completing renovations on the former Judge Haynes Elementary School, which will reopen in September as the Jay County Early Learning Center, serving 150 kids, ages 6 months to 5 years.

Potential Advantages

There are many potential advantages to a school-to-community-child-care-hub conversion. These include:

• Increased child care supply for the community, and more financially sustainable child care programs, which increases the likelihood of high-quality offerings.
• Low barrier to entry for child care programs wishing to open or expand: the facilities are already zoned for the relevant uses, elementary schools tend to be centrally located, and they usually have adequate parking.
• Smoother path to implementing a shared services model, which can reduce administrative overhead and improve both the family and provider experience.
• Reduced social isolation for providers by offering an organic community of practice.
• Reinvigoration of neighborhoods by refreshing community assets that would otherwise be unused or underutilized.
• Stream of revenue for school districts, as opposed to asking them to absorb maintenance costs for empty, potentially decaying buildings.
• Potential way to allow communities to incentivize or recruit programs that meet community needs (e.g., serving a certain language group, a certain set of hours, etc.).

Potential Drawbacks

The conversion approach is not without its challenges. Potential drawbacks include:

• Conversions require a large amount of up-front funding: Even a kindergarten classroom is not necessarily matched to the needs of a toddler classroom, much less classrooms for older elementary students. Some sort of grant, whether governmental or philanthropic, is likely a prerequisite.
• The need to have a single point person coordinating the effort appears to be an emerging best practice, which requires ongoing funding.
• Licensing and regulation in most states is not set up with the idea of multiple, distinct child care providers operating under one roof (Minnesota’s family child care pods are one exception).
• Most insurance companies have little experience with insuring a multi-provider setting, and need to be engaged early in the process in order to ensure insurance needs can be met.
• Relationships between the multiple actors involved—school districts (including central office staff and the school board); the intermediary organization coordinating the conversion and acting as “landlord” to resident programs; and the owners, staff, and families of the individual child care programs—require careful management.

Steps Toward Action

Communities interested in pursuing elementary-school-to-community-child-care-hub conversions should consider the following steps, which can be initiated by a local nonprofit, school district, municipal government, or other relevant stakeholder(s):

• Identify an intermediary organization to coordinate the conversion effort.
• Initiate conversations with the school district to gauge interest and viability.
• Identify philanthropic or governmental grant resources to support the conversion.
• Gauge interest from local child care providers.
• Scope out a project plan, budget, and timeline.
• Check in with the relevant state agency or agencies.

If these early steps show promise and key stakeholders make a decision to move ahead, communities can begin to execute on more technical and operational actions.

Local, state, and federal policymakers can smooth the path for these conversions by pursuing the following steps:

• Make substantial, one-time infrastructure grants available for conversions.
• Revise licensing standards or regulations, or create new categories of licensing, to support these multi-provider settings.
• Work with insurance companies to ensure the availability of liability insurance and other necessary policies.
• Ensure elementary school conversions are an allowable use of child care facility funding.
• Curate and promote documentation of conversion best practices.
• Integrate conversions into existing child care supply-building strategies.
• Encourage or provide incentives for school districts to consider community child care hub conversion as part of their demographic planning processes, including plans that involve potential elementary school consolidation or closure.