A Buffalo parent advocate said some school closures might be necessary as the district confronts declining enrollment and financial challenges, but families and students should have a greater role in deciding what those changes look like.
Buffalo Public Schools Interim Superintendent Ebony Prophet-Bullock announced Friday that eight schools have been identified for proposed closure beginning in the 2027-28 academic year. The proposal is part of the district’s four-year fiscal stability plan and still requires approval from the Buffalo Board of Education.
Parent advocate Jessica Bauer-Walker said she believes the district has reached a point where some schools will have to close. She pointed to schools operating over capacity while others remain significantly under-enrolled, but said BPS needs to be clearer about how it determined which schools belong on the list.
“If we're looking at decreasing enrollment and how schools are doing and a variety of other factors, it looks like they have taken those things into consideration,” Bauer-Walker said. “But I think it's important that they're fully transparent with how they made those decisions and also allow an opportunity for family and community feedback.”
Bauer-Walker said the district also needs to confront longstanding racial, economic and academic disparities as it weighs consolidation.
“We also need to make sure that we're putting a plan in place that ensures all our students can succeed,” she said. “We have been dealing with some of these issues for such a long time. This is a billion-dollar school district, and we expect to get good outcomes for our children.”
The latest proposal follows an earlier attempt to close schools during the 2025-26 academic year. A district committee recommended closing PS 3 D’Youville Porter and PS 90 Early Childhood Center, but BPS backed away from both recommendations in January after receiving feedback from staff, students, families and community members. At the time, district leaders said they would hire a professional management consultant to examine potential closures in future school years. PS 90 has now returned to the closure list.
Bauer-Walker said last year’s process included parents and community members on the closure committee, while she believes the current process has been less transparent.
“Families deserve to be able to have a dialogue with their school and with the district and with their elected officials, and ask: 'Why is this decision being made?'” she said. “And let's not do things to people, but with people.”
Student says proposed changes feel like displacement
Leonardo da Vinci High School junior Abdullah Alhaneef said students at his school had already been seeking answers about its future months before Friday’s announcement.
Alhaneef, who is also a youth community health worker, said Da Vinci students attended a Board of Education meeting in August and expected a follow-up meeting with Prophet-Bullock. He said that meeting did not happen before the new proposal was announced.
“Fast forward to October, nobody told us anything, and there was no discussion with any student,” Alhaneef said, adding that he was surprised when the proposal was released.
Alhaneef has attended both Riverside Academy and Da Vinci and said he is particularly concerned about what consolidation could mean for students who have already established relationships with teachers and school communities.
He said the impact could be especially significant for English-language learners who recently arrived in the United States.
“They feel like they're being displaced. They have the teachers and the community that they love,” Alhaneef said. “By repurposing those schools, by closing some of those schools, they're not only just displacing them. There's an opportunity in that community that they're losing now because of what's happening.”
Alhaneef also said Da Vinci students conducted their own survey examining how a potential move could affect transportation. He said some students who currently have roughly 15-minute trips to Da Vinci could face commutes of about an hour depending on where programs are relocated.
Bauer-Walker said those kinds of experiences should be considered alongside enrollment, finances and other data used by the district.
“The real, lived experiences of students and families are an incredibly important data point, too,” she said.
She said transportation changes can affect more than a student’s commute, potentially changing parents’ work schedules, family routines and students’ ability to access their schools. Bauer-Walker said families, students and staff should be asked what support they would need if a closure or consolidation ultimately moves forward.
BPS has scheduled three community meetings on the proposal: a virtual meeting Thursday, Oct. 8 at 2 p.m.; an in-person meeting Thursday, Oct. 15 at 5:30 p.m. at Renovation Church; and a meeting Tuesday, Oct. 20 at 5:30 p.m. at PS 156 Frederick Law Olmsted.
The Board of Education must review and approve the proposed closures before they can take effect.
