In 2013, Philadelphia shut down 23 schools. The Wisconsin state legislature has ordered Milwaukee to put its vacant schools on the market. No one’s using this track now (Photo: Nitram242/Flickr)Ĭities all across the country are dealing with this issue. When it’s closed, it’s seen as a loss, and one that’s shared by the whole neighborhood.” “Communities feel more ownership over a school build than they might over another abandoned building,” says Emily Dowdall, who’s written two Pew Charitable Trusts reports on the topic of shuttered schools. Despite the yearly loss of between 1,400 to 2,160 schools, the total number of schools has actually stayed relatively stable, between 98,000 and 99,000 schools, according to the federal Department of Education.īut the closed schools still represent a blow to local communities. But there’s no guarantee: “We’ve done eight studies in 15 years, on this one building, and none of them have panned out.”īoynton Beach is far from the only city saddled with old school buildings. For a decade, from 2001 to 2011, about one to two percent of America’s total stock of schools closed each year.
The building may still have a chance: two weeks after the initial vote, the city decide to give Gonzalez four months to come up with a plan to redevelop the building. The old Boynton Beach high school (Photo: REG Architects) Elementary and middle school students were in class here until 1990, but the building hasn’t been used for its original purpose-a high school-since 1949. The high school has been vacant for the last 15 years for about a decade before that it was used as storage.
The building is undoubtedly unique, but at the beginning of August, city commissioners voted to knock it down. “I haven’t seen any other building in South Florida that tried to blend both styles of architecture,” says Rick Gonzalez, president of REG Architects, a firm based in West Palm Beach. It was built in 1927, by William Manley King, a south Florida architect of some renown, and if you look closely, you might notice that it has Art Deco lines integrated into its Mediterranean revival form. An abandoned school (Photo: Nitram242/Flickr)īoynton Beach’s old high school is a beautiful building.