These four Miami-Dade public schools could close, consolidate after this year
Four Miami-Dade public schools are facing closure and consolidation at next week’s school board meeting.
According to the agenda for the board’s June 17 meeting, those schools include Lenora B. Smith Elementary in Liberty City, Miami Springs Middle, Pine Villa Elementary in Goulds and Richmond Heights Middle in South Miami-Dade.
The decision will come at a time when the district is navigating both decreasing enrollment and decreasing funding. The number of students attending public schools in Miami-Dade dropped about 13,000, or 4%, this past school year; the district’s budget, still more than $7 billion, for the 2025-2026 school year, ended up about $189 million less than the prior year.
Three of the four schools under consideration for closure are proposed to be consolidated with immediately adjacent schools. Lenora B. Smith Elementary is slated to consolidate with Georgia Jones-Ayers Middle School to become a K-8 center, Richmond Heights Middle is set to consolidate with BioTECH at Richmond Heights High School and Pine Villa Elementary would consolidate with Arthur and Polly Mays Conservatory of the Arts to form a K-12 campus.
Miami Springs Middle would consolidate with Miami Springs High, which is located about a mile and a half away.
Five other schools were recommended to close by the Attendance Boundary Committee during a February meeting, but they are not included in next week’s agenda item.
According to data shared by the district, the student bodies at all four schools under consideration for consolidation are almost entirely composed of minority students.
No plans have been released for the repurposing of the four schools’ original campuses.
‘These properties belong to the community’
Speaking after a roundtable event held in his district Wednesday, District 4 School Board Member Roberto Alonso said the repurposing plans were “evolving.”
“I mean, everything is moving right now at a pace where we’re trying to evaluate what’s the best use, always going back to the educational return. Like, how can we better use those buildings,” Alonso said.
Alonso was adamant that the school board should seek opportunities to either repurpose or lease properties that schools vacate, not sell them.
“We feel that it’s very important, the board has said it numerous times, that these properties continue to belong to the community. So, any negotiation that we ever go into with any developers or any of these partnerships, it’s always a lease. Why? Because this property will always be controlled by this community, by the electeds that are here, together with the district, to make sure that it always has that educational purpose, and we’re not just selling off land or providing it for other uses,” Alonso said.
As an example of what he deemed a successful consolidation, Alonso mentioned the closure of Country Club Middle in his district, which consolidated into Lawton Chiles Middle – both were near 40% enrollment, Alonso said.
Now, the site is home to a professional development training center and a campus for South Florida Autism Charter School.
Like Alonso’s example, the four closures are largely in response to low enrollment rates at the schools. In many cases, only a fraction of students within the attendance boundary attend the public school, with parents sending their children to charter schools, private schools and other public schools. Recent laws passed by the Florida legislature promoting both charter schools and universal private school vouchers aim to increase school choice for parents.
According to information presented at the February Attendance Boundary Committee meeting, enrollment at Pine Villa Elementary is 154 students and only 24% of K-5 students living in the school’s attendance boundary attend the school. Somerset Academy Silver Palms, a K-8 charter school with almost 2,000 students enrolled, and its campus in Princeton absorbed almost 21% of the neighborhood’s elementary school students.
In Richmond Heights Middle’s case, 203 of the 1,265 students living in the attendance boundary, or 16%, attend the school. More students living within the boundary, 17.5%, attend nearby public schools with magnet programs, like Herbert A. Ammons Middle and Arvida Middle, according to data shared at the February meeting.
None of the schools slated to be closed have a white student population greater than 3.3%. The affected student bodies are almost entirely Black and Hispanic.
During the Wednesday roundtable event, Superintendent Jose Dotres framed underutilization of buildings owned by Miami-Dade County Public Schools as an opportunity.
“In every crisis, there’s an opportunity, and the opportunity is here,” Dotres said.
Dotres mentioned the recent leasing of properties owned by the school system to private Jewish schools. Last month, the school board approved an agreement to lease the former Biscayne Gardens Elementary facility to the Talmudic College of Florida and Yeshiva Elementary for $968,000 per year.
He also mentioned the possibility of private pre-K providers leasing space in schools with the capacity to bring them on. That’s in addition to recent co-location agreements reached with charter school operator Success Academy brokered under Florida’s “School of Hope” laws, which now require districts to make underused and ”persistently low-performing” schools available to be occupied by approved charter operators.
Dotres also said the district is considering opportunities for both workforce and affordable housing as well as “park opportunities.”
“As we move into the future, we will have this landscape of multi-use buildings, all for the benefit of education, but also for the benefit of the community,” Dotres said.
Broward County Public Schools is currently considering closing more than 10 schools, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel has reported.
Other schools under consideration, other items
Five other schools were on the Attendance Boundary Committee’s recommendation list for potential closure and repurposing advanced at a February meeting.
Those schools include: Robert Russa Moton Elementary in West Perrine, Rainbow Park Elementary in Opa-Locka, Parkway Elementary in North Miami, Phillis Wheatley Elementary in Overtown and Mandarin Lakes K-8 Center in Homestead.
Like the schools under consideration for consolidation, these schools serve an almost exclusively minority population and face declining enrollment.
Though attendance boundaries for these schools were also recommended to be dissolved by the Attendance Boundary Committee, they are not on the agenda for the June 17 meeting as of Monday evening.
District 1 School Board Member Steve Gallon told the Herald that those plans could be voted on by the board later this year.
More changes to the district’s attendance boundary process could be on the horizon.
At the meeting next week, the board will also discuss a proposal from Gallon to direct the district to review under-enrolled middle and secondary schools and determine whether more should be converted to a 6-12 model or another grade configuration. The proposal was brought forward with a specific focus on North Dade Middle School in Gallon’s district.
School board member Luisa Santos also has a proposal on the agenda that seeks to “strengthen” the attendance boundary process. Her proposal would call for an alignment of the Attendance Boundary Committee process and the magnet and school of choice application timeline. Santos’ proposal also calls for a more transparent and multilingual community-engagement process during the boundary adjustment timeline.