Built in 1896, Booker T. Washington Middle School is a distinctive redbrick schoolhouse that after mid-century additions consumed most of a city block, growing to educate about 1,000 students a year as the area became a thriving Black middle-class community.

Then families started leaving the city, mostly for the suburbs. In 2002, when the current city school board chair began teaching there, one of the four floors was vacant.

Twenty years later, the West Baltimore building was half-empty. Then another problem arose: Booker T. Washington desperately needed a new roof. The cost: $5 million.

Today, the historic building with a cupola and arches houses just 363 students from two schools, and one of them — Renaissance Academy — may close in June, leaving empty all but a tiny fraction of the massive building.

Across Baltimore, school enrollments have been shrinking, driving a proliferation of small schools that require an outsize investment to stay open. That’s led Baltimore City Public Schools to close or merge 39 schools over the past decade, yet the city still has at least 30 schools, many on the West Side, that are operating far below capacity.

Across town in Southeast Baltimore, schools are bursting at the seams, thanks to two decades of rowhouse renovations and an influx of Hispanic immigrants. Now the city has both one of the largest numbers of underused school buildings in the state and also the largest number of overcrowded schools.

The school system is left with a dilemma: Overspend on small schools, or close these vital community anchors that could attract new families and support existing ones.

That dilemma will come into focus next month when the school board votes on whether to close four small schools, even as parents and communities fight vigorously to keep them. It is a decision that speaks to how difficult it will be to right-size its schools after waves of reform — from charter schools to small schools — while also balancing the need to keep schools open during a renovation of vacant housing across the city.

Long term, school board President Robert Salley said, the system has critical decisions ahead: “It is the work of the new superintendent coming in, and I think we have to be unabashed about that.” The system’s leaders will have to analyze how to balance investments in schools to match population growth and investment in housing projects, he said.

The value of a small school

Seventeen-year-old Caron Litaker came to Renaissance Academy in the middle of his sophomore year after a rough start at a larger city high school.

“I wasn’t, like, talking as much. I wasn’t open about performances. I wasn’t on no sports teams. I wasn’t doing dance. I was just so, like, lost in my ninth grade,” he said.

As soon as he arrived at Renaissance, which has just 245 students, he felt accepted, he said. The halls and classrooms were quiet. Phones were put away.

“This is a serious, new school,” he said he told himself. “Nobody knows you here. You can open up, you can meet new people. You don’t got to be shy, you don’t got to be scared.”

Now a senior, he is class president, in after-school activities and expects to be dual-enrolled in community college and high school next semester. He’s also been accepted to several colleges.

Renaissance is a place where teachers can focus on individual students, he said, because classes are small. “It was a place for you to actually get to know everybody,” he said. “It’s like, we all are family.”

As a designated community school, it also provides resources the neighborhood has come to rely on. Felicia Moore, the community school coordinator, said the phone rings all day with calls from residents and parents asking for help connecting with substance abuse treatment, accessing the school’s food pantry, writing a résumé or using a computer.

But the principal, Tammatha Woodhouse, recognizes that the small environment comes at a cost.

She can’t give students the high school experience of larger schools. There’s not an array of sports or multiple foreign languages. She can only offer a small sample of Advanced Placement classes.

“You have the warm and loving relationships, but how do I give these kids a true traditional high school experience has always been my struggle,” she said.

The average student at Renaissance also costs more to educate than a student in a larger high school. Schools are funded based on how many kids they enroll but still must pay teachers the same amount whether a class has 24 students or 12.

For the past four years, Woodhouse has worked with the financial officers in the district to figure out how much more she needs to operate the school. This year, the district is giving her enough money to cover four staff members, she said. The district said it is giving Renaissance an additional $310,000.

With dozens of small schools in the district, that could add up to millions of dollars each year, although by the time of publication the district declined to give a breakdown of the amount it is spending to subsidize small schools.

On top of operating costs, many small schools are located in large old buildings with high maintenance costs for the district. Besides the new roof on Booker T. Washington, the building that houses Renaissance, the district has put in new doors and windows.

In some buildings, the utility and maintenance costs outweigh what should be spent to house small numbers of students, but the district currently has little option, said Alison Perkins-Cohen, chief of staff for the system. In some parts of the city the population is shrinking, she said, but you still need a school to serve that part of the city. “That’s a very difficult situation,” she said.

For instance, city schools will soon spend millions to put a new roof on a building in Northeast Baltimore that houses two small high schools and is about 67% full.

Small was once in vogue

Baltimore’s numerous small schools came about partly by design.

In the early 2000s, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested millions in Baltimore — along with other cities across the country — to break up large high schools. This wave of reform advocated small schools as a way to provide more individualized attention to students. Northern High School, for instance, was broken into two high schools. In addition, the city was approving new small charter schools.

The legacy of that investment is a plethora of small high schools with different approaches and few remaining comprehensive neighborhood high schools.

Then a decade ago, a state-funded $1 billion program called 21st Century School allowed the city to renovate and construct about 27 schools. Perkins-Cohen said the district prioritized areas of the city that had seen historic disinvestment, many in West Baltimore.

In the process, she said, the city closed and combined schools and put students in brand-new buildings.

Meanwhile, the system was losing about 1,400 Black students a year, many of them on the West Side. The losses have slowed in recent years to about 400 students, balanced by about 1,400 Latino students joining the rolls, mostly on the East Side. In the 2024-2025 school year, the system saw its enrollment increase by 1,000 students.

As of 2024, about 20% of city schools were less than three-quarters full, far below the state’s optimum of 95% full. Underutilized schools are also in South Baltimore and scattered around the city.

If other school districts faced the city’s predicament, they would redraw attendance zones, but in Baltimore that isn’t easy. Many of the city’s elementary schools accept students by lottery or from outside their zones because they are under-enrolled. Middle and high school students can travel anywhere in the city to the school of their choice.

To continue closing schools on the West Side will leave those communities with fewer anchors in a part of town plagued by vacant and deteriorating houses.

With the Greater Baltimore Committee and the community organizers from BUILD, Mayor Brandon Scott committed in late 2023 to establishing a comprehensive plan to eliminate Baltimore’s glut of more than 12,000 structures and some 20,000 empty lots among its vacant properties, a significant percentage in West Baltimore.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed onto the plan, which calls for $3 billion in public investment sustained over at least 15 years, saying he wanted to help reduce the number of vacants by 5,000 over five years.

Closing a school creates a tremendous amount of trauma for residents of an area, and waiting five years for neighborhood renovations to bring children back may not be the correct approach, said Dan Ellis, chief executive officer at Neighborhood Housing Services of Baltimore, a nonprofit that helps renovate vacant houses.

“I’m not suggesting that there are no schools that should be closed. But I am suggesting that it’s not simply a numbers game. I think it would be possible for the city to look at where are the vacant houses, where do we anticipate development occurring over the next 10 years,” said Ellis, whose organization is renovating 20 houses near Coppin State University. Based on population trends, he said, the city could predict how many children might be in those renovated homes and plan the school closures around that.

Families, he said, do not want to live next door to a shuttered school with no future plans. That eyesore makes selling renovated homes harder, he said.

The city should involve the communities in the process of when and where major investments will be made to improve housing and how that will affect their schools, he said.

Salley believes the board and a new superintendent, expected to be chosen by April, will have to reassess the inventory of schools. While the city supports choice in middle and high school, he said, one of the areas under consideration is “what are the opportunities to invest in neighborhood schools?”

He also believes that some of the empty space could be used for career and technology learning spaces so that students have more chances to gain skills before they graduate.

Salley taught at Booker T. Middle School between 2002 and 2005 and is intimately aware of the city’s shrinking enrollment.

The board votes on Jan. 14 whether it will close Renaissance, Dallas F. Nicholas Sr. Elementary School and two charters, New Song Academy and Baltimore Collegiate School for Boys.

If it shrinks the footprint of its schools, city leaders hope that students will get a better education in a larger school and that costs will go down, but many communities will mourn the loss.

For Renaissance’s principal, the work in her small school has always been what she calls “heart work” that helps students thrive. Her hope is that the city can find a financially stable model for small schools to allow some to survive.

Banner reporter Hallie Miller contributed to this story.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.