Several years ago, Oklahoma City Public Schools shuttered more than a dozen of its school buildings.
It was part of a realignment process in the district to right-size student populations within schools — some were overcrowded, others were underenrolled — and to make the school experience better and more consistent for students across the city.
But what to do with all of those empty buildings?
It’s a question that scores of district leaders across the country are now asking themselves. As enrollment has declined in some public schools — due to the greater uptake of alternative education environments such as virtual schools, homeschooling and private schools since the pandemic; lower birth rates; and population shifts that have left some school districts with far fewer children than they served years ago — a number of districts have made the decision to consolidate student populations and close down school buildings.
Then what?
“When buildings sit vacant, they can become unsafe spaces, and we didn’t want that to happen,” says Stephanie Hinton, executive director of early childhood at Oklahoma City Public Schools.
One idea that has taken hold in many districts: repurposing these empty school buildings into early care and education centers.
It’s a natural fit, says Aaron Loewenberg, a senior policy analyst with the Education Policy Program at New America, a think tank.
These buildings are often capacious and centrally located within a community, featuring large parking lots and already zoned for educational purposes, notes Loewenberg. They’re also typically former elementary schools, meaning that some aspects of the original classroom and building design can accommodate younger learners.
“From the school district perspective, you’d rather be getting a little bit of revenue on rent than just … having a decaying asset,” explains Loewenberg.
The field of early care and education, meanwhile, has a severe supply shortage. Most areas of the country have too few spots to serve all the children from birth to age 5 who need them. It has left tens of thousands of families with disrupted work schedules and children without access to high-quality early learning experiences.
“It can be a win-win if done right,” says Loewenberg.
From One Community Service to Another
Education leaders in Oklahoma City thought so, too. Several of the schools the district shuttered in 2019 have since become sites for early learning programs.
One former school, Gatewood Elementary, became the Gatewood Early Learning Center in 2021, with eight classrooms serving infants, toddlers and preschoolers.
Gatewood prioritizes the children of district staff for its spots — a major employee benefit that Hinton had long requested the district begin offering, as a way to stay competitive with surrounding school districts.
“It’s really hard to find affordable child care,” she says, “and if you’re on a teacher contract, you may not need or want it in the summer.”
Another former elementary school in the district, called Pierce, was leased out to Sunbeam Family Services, a long-running nonprofit in the area that provides early childhood education and wraparound support services for families.
Sunbeam renovated the space and built out 14 early childhood classrooms, creating all new child care slots in a part of the city that greatly needed more access to high-quality early education programming, Hinton shares. (Sunbeam later leased and renovated a second vacant elementary school in the district, creating 12 new early childhood classrooms.)
It’s no small amount of work to convert these elementary schools into developmentally appropriate early learning spaces, according to those who have done it. But it’s worthwhile.
Elementary schools are taxpayer-funded buildings built and operated in service of the community, Hinton points out. Many school district leaders want the buildings to have a second life that also benefits the community.
Plus, the space is unlike any you would find for an early learning classroom elsewhere, says Paula Gates, chief program officer at Sunbeam.
“These classrooms are massive, because they’re built for 25 second-graders,” she says. “We’re getting this square footage to create really beautiful classroom environments for 12 toddlers or 18 3-year-olds.”
“The extra space for us is not a burden, it’s a benefit,” adds her colleague Andrew Norton, senior director of IT and facilities at Sunbeam.
The cost to lease and renovate a vacant school building is high — Sunbeam invested $2.2 million in the Pierce location — but it is a better deal than if they’d built a brand new building.
“It would’ve cost exponentially more for us to do that, before you even [factor in] land costs,” Norton says.
Under Construction
Not every converted K-12 school building racks up price tags in the millions, but cost is certainly a key challenge, says Todd Hays, senior vice president of Lakeshore Learning Materials, which has helped furnish a number of elementary schools repurposed for early learning.
The upgrades at Gatewood, the Oklahoma City location serving children of district staff, cost about $150,000, says Hinton.
The average cost to outfit just one high-quality early learning classroom, Hays says, is roughly $25,000.
Buildings can have a range of needs — some old school buildings may need all new HVAC systems or modern plumbing, for example — but the renovations tend to share a few characteristics.
The main change needed is to the bathrooms.
It is standard for early learning classrooms to have a private bathroom inside them. Young children in toddler and preschool classrooms tend to be undergoing potty training, and they are not old enough to walk themselves out of the room, down the hall and into a public bathroom with stalls.
Infant classrooms can go without bathrooms, since those children are still in diapers, but other rooms require the addition of a bathroom and sink. (Some former kindergarten classrooms may have already been equipped with an in-room bathroom, but even in these cases, the toilets might need to be lowered.)
Another important feature, according to Emily McGowan, director of product services at Lakeshore Learning, is playground access, especially since outdoor time is a regular component of most early learning programs.
“You want to be thoughtful about how you place students in the buildings so you’re not taking 20 3-year-olds from the farthest classroom to the front door,” she adds.
At Tucson Unified School District in Arizona, which converted two empty elementary buildings into early learning centers back in 2014, playground equipment had to be replaced so that it was appropriate for the ages and development stages of younger children, says Reem Kievit, senior director of community schools and preschool programs for the district.
The same is true for classroom furniture. Built-in cubbies need to be height-appropriate for smaller kids. Individual desks may be swapped for communal tables.
‘A Beautiful, Wonderful Thing’
Another challenge of turning K-12 spaces into early childhood ones is finding enough staff to fill the classrooms.
Educators have long been a scarce resource in the field of early care and education, and a new space doesn’t automatically change that.
“We have insane waitlists for infants and 1-year-olds. We just cannot find enough staff,” says Kievit in Tucson. “Staffing is a barrier [because] they are not certified teachers getting paid a certified salary of $60,000 a year.”
However, many of the school districts that operate the early childhood programs themselves, including Gatewood in Oklahoma City and the two programs at Tucson Unified, employ the early childhood educators directly. Though their wages are not on par with elementary school teachers, they are more competitive than what private programs in their areas offer, Hinton and Kievit say.
And the early childhood educators get access to district benefits, which is a huge draw. In Tucson, this includes perks such as paid time off, sick leave and health insurance — all rarities in private programs.
“Because we are a school district, we have some pieces in place that help us to recruit,” adds Hinton.
Despite some challenges, these early childhood programs are, by and large, boons in their communities.
“We get calls and emails on a regular basis from teachers across the district who get our students, who promote from pre-K to kindergarten,” says Kievit. “They are in awe of how well-prepared these kids are.”
“It’s a beautiful, wonderful thing,” she adds. “Families are always happy.”
Loewenberg, of New America, views these programs as opportunities for school districts to “capture” families early and make them feel part of the school community.
In Tucson, about 80 percent to 90 percent of families who attend one of the two district-run early childhood centers end up choosing Tucson Unified for their children’s kindergarten, Kievit says. To her, that means the early learning program “plays a significant role in recruitment and retention” of students and families in the district.
With some early successes — and more school closures likely down the road — Loewenberg and others believe we will continue to see more of these types of conversions.
“It’s not going away,” he says. “This is something we’ll be talking a lot more about.”
This post is exclusively published on eduexpertisehub.com
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