DeKalb is bracing for school closures. These parents say it’s the wrong move.
When the DeKalb County School District first put out a list of schools that could close, Matthew Talbert believed the message from district leaders: It was just a first draft. Things would likely change.
His kids’ school being on the list was concerning, but he wasn’t going to panic. Then the second round of plans came out in April, and Henderson Mill Elementary was still on the list.
So the environmental engineer did what he knows how to do: He dove into the weeds.
Hundreds of pages of facility condition reports, capacity spreadsheets and contracts later, and Talbert is worried about the proposal to close dozens of schools.
“I don’t trust the numbers on this,” he said. The data “paints a picture of dilapidated schools across the district. I’m not convinced of that from the findings in the reports.”
He’s one of dozens of DeKalb parents who are rejecting the district’s assertion that schools likely need to close to right-size the behemoth organization. The state’s third-largest school system has too few students and too much unused classroom space, district officials say. Some schools are underused while others are overcrowded — or they will be in five, 10, 15 years, according to district projections. It’s too costly to go on this way.
“This imbalance limits programs, course offerings, and resources, making it harder to deliver a full educational experience,” district spokesperson Jennifer Carraciolo said in an emailed statement.
But parents who have thrown themselves into group chats, Facebook groups, online petitions and surveys of their own are coming to entirely different conclusions. They’ve accused the district of having too little or inaccurate information to make these decisions.
District leaders are asking people to be patient. They’ve been going through the feedback from the community and expect to have an update in May. But it feels urgent to parents.
“We all understand there are going to be changes,” said Sarah Rauers, a parent at Evansdale Elementary near Tucker. “But what we are saying is the product ... I don’t think that it reflects the need of our communities.”
Need more details
Talbert has a kindergartener at Henderson Mill Elementary in Atlanta this year, and a 3-year-old who will go there too — if it’s still open. The redistricting process will take six to eight years, DeKalb officials say. That would be the bulk of his kids’ education.
“A month ago, I wasn’t worried about any of this,” he said. But after combing through the data, hearing the district out at a community meeting and addressing the school board, he thinks the district needs to take a step back.
He said he found schools that hadn’t been thoroughly assessed for their educational suitability and incorrect information about enrollment projections and site sizes.
For example, every school in the district has a facility condition report, which estimates repairs that could be needed in the near future. Some, like Henderson Mill’s, are labeled “unassessed,” as opposed to “assessed.” They don’t have proof experts actually went to the sites to evaluate the condition, and don’t seem to adhere to industry standards, Talbert said. Of the two dozen elementary schools proposed to close or convert to something else, 12 were unassessed.
Tracy Richter, vice president of planning services at construction management group HPM, said it’s normal to evaluate facilities on a rotating schedule, not all at once. The district and company have made their evaluation data publicly available, but haven’t made any recommendations yet. The process is far from over. He calls it “planning in public.”
“When the first iteration came out, it showed the total impact of what (closures and redistricting) could look like,” Richter said. “As we go further into this process ... we’re going to get more laser-focused on these impacts and ultimately how we can set a road map to align everything.”
But parents like Talbert don’t understand how their schools could even make it onto an early list of possible closures without more recent, detailed information. Where are the impact studies about traffic, cost and academic outcomes, he asked. Where is the third-party evaluation of this work?
“They should have a narrative, a rationale, timing, cost justification for everything,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like the county has done that, and I think it’s to their detriment.”
Who’s in charge?
The school board hired HPM in 2025 to manage its capital improvement program. It agreed to pay the company roughly $6 million in both 2025 and 2026. HPM has been facilitating the redistricting process.
For a lot of parents, that’s a problem.
“It became pretty apparent that HPM is kind of running the show here,” said Rauers, who has been involved with organizing rallies and advocating to keep Evansdale Elementary open. “This is a business model that HPM has that they’ve implemented or tried to implement in multiple other cities. It doesn’t allow for consideration of neighborhood schools because it’s not part of their financial model.”
The district refutes the idea that HPM is in charge.
“Any vendor operates under district oversight, and final decisions will be made by the Board of Education based on data, community input, and student need,” Caracciolo said.
And Richter doesn’t understand the idea that the company benefits from school closures. HPM is a planning firm, separate from the company’s construction arm. It doesn’t do construction work for districts where they are hired for planning.
Their business model is to evaluate a school system’s facilities and help it plan for the future, he said.
“We’ve been asked to do some really hard work across this country” where a negative response is to be expected, Richter said. “But to think that it’s our business model to prey on this is, in my opinion — it’s not even close to that.”
Rauers said it feels to her like there’s a leadership vacuum in DeKalb schools. The board has yet to hire a permanent superintendent, and it’s an election year for three of the seven school board seats.
“I think what (parents) are connecting on across the board is the premise that a construction firm ... is the appropriate body to shape the future of our students’ lives, our family’s lives and the entire county’s lives.”
An equity issue
After sitting through almost two years of twice-monthly Student Assignment Project committee meetings, this is not what Lysa Moore had in mind.
“I feel like the (school closure scenarios) missed all of the nuance of all of the conversations that we had been having for so long,” Moore said. Her child is a sixth grader at McNair Middle near Decatur. The current proposal would create five sixth-through 12th-grade campuses, including one at McNair High.
First of all, when they discussed changing grade band configurations, she thought splitting elementary schools into smaller chunks — like pre-K through third grade in a separate school from fourth and fifth grades — was the consensus. Grouping together 11-year-olds and 18-year-olds on the same campus feels like an obvious safety concern to her and other parents.
But in a broader sense, she thought the plan to come out of all that work would include fewer school closures — particularly in south DeKalb, which bears the brunt under the current proposal.
It feels like history repeating itself. After the 2008 global financial crisis, DeKalb closed eight schools. Most of them were in Decatur or further south.
“Particularly with the history of this area being systemically disinvested in, it was painful to have spent so much time talking about those things to turn around and do what a lot of us in this community assumed would be done anyway — that they would look at our schools on the south side of DeKalb and say, ‘Just close them. They’re underenrolled, just close them,’” Moore said.
Board members have noticed that the feedback the district has received so far hasn’t included much from families in south DeKalb.
“We are just not reaching our target audience,” board member Whitney McGinniss said at a meeting this month.
More to come
As parents have been organizing protests, creating websites and meeting with their representatives to talk about these issues, district leaders have been parsing through thousands of survey responses to figure out their next steps, said interim Superintendent Norman Sauce.
“There’s not nothing happening between now and the end of the year,” he said on April 20. “Just give us a short period of time here to totally assess what we learned.”
The district plans to provide an update about next steps, including whether there will be more additional surveys or a more updated school closure proposal, by the beginning of May. District leaders maintain how important the effort is to correct enrollment imbalances.
“The Student Assignment Project continues to evolve based on what we’ve heard from the community,” Carraciolo said. “It’s about ensuring that every student has access to strong academic programs, supportive environments, and equitable opportunities. Our goal is to strengthen, not weaken, student outcomes by aligning resources and right-sizing schools.”
The school board is not scheduled to vote on any school closures until late 2026.
As the district works on its plan, parents keep working as well. Those at Ashford Park Elementary are trying to organize a meeting with district leaders to talk about the proposal to convert the high-performing school to an Early Learning Center. The newly formed DeKalb Schools Coalition is looking for parent volunteers to help highlight flaws in the redistricting effort.
Like many others in DeKalb now, Jennifer Alexander-Sanchez said she’s spending time — at least two hours a day — advocating for the future of Evansdale Elementary. It’s the school her daughter attends now, and is slated for possible closure. The work is a big lift, she said — and it can be disheartening.
“We’re kind of doing (the district’s) work for them,” she said. “I’m just so frustrated the board does not seem to be listening to us.”
Richter said the response from DeKalb families is similar to what he’s seen in other communities in 26 years in this line of work.
“They’re defending the public school system as a true institute of something that communities need,” he said. “I get it.”
About the Author
Cassidy Alexander covers Georgia education issues for the AJC. She previously covered education for The Daytona Beach News-Journal, and was named Florida's Outstanding New Journalist of the Year.
