In December 1949, Educational Leadership declared that America's schools were in a race against the stork.

"The stork has started a race with space," wrote Don Patterson of the U.S. Office of Education, "which at present finds the bird far out in front." Schools staggered class schedules, raised entrance ages and converted libraries, auditoriums, hallways and principals' offices into classrooms. One suburban elementary school had watched its average class size rise from 37 students to 56 in two years. Some communities turned to temporary buildings and Quonset huts, but even where districts had money to build, Patterson wrote, new facilities could not keep up with the children arriving.

America spent the next two decades trying to win that race. Thousands of schools went up during the postwar construction boom; one-quarter of the public school buildings still operating today were built in the 1950s and 1960s. They are the physical legacy of a country, and a school system, designed around the expectation that growth would continue.

By November 1980, Educational Leadership was documenting the opposite problem. Enrollment-linked funding was falling, buildings were being sold or closed and districts were confronting what researchers called the "management of decline."

That phrase could describe the stories arriving today. Miami-Dade's district-run schools started the year with 15,000 fewer students. Palm Beach County lost nearly 7,000. More than 60 Houston schools are less than half full, and Colorado's Boulder Valley district is proposing to close six schools and consolidate four more.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. A school designed for 800 students does not become half as expensive when only 400 arrive. But closing one does not make the building, or its place in the neighborhood, disappear. A 2013 Pew study of closures in 12 cities found that districts had sold, leased or reused 267 properties since 2005 but still had 301 unused sites on the market. Some had sat vacant for more than a decade, costing money to maintain while casting what the report called "a pall" over their neighborhoods.

The stork eventually lost its lead. The infrastructure built to catch it remained.

— Thomas

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