Excess capacity at elementary schools might someday lead Arlington Public Schools to close facilities — but there aren’t any immediate plans to do this, officials say.
“We are not projecting a need to close any schools at this time,” Board Chair Mary Kadera said in response to a question at last week’s Arlington County Civic Federation meeting.
Kadera, fellow board members Kathleen Clark and Bethany Zecher Sutton and Superintendent Francisco Durán participated in the annual gathering.
In response to the question, Kadera acknowledged that there is currently enough excess capacity in the county’s 25 elementary schools to, in theory, warrant using one of them for a different purpose.
But, she said, what still needs to be considered are real-world conditions and whether schools can actually meet their stated capacities, given the needs of various types of programs they house.
“When we know that, we’ll have a more accurate understanding [of] what space is available and whether that space crosses a threshold where we would even begin to have that conversation,” Kadera said. “But we are not at that place yet.”
According to school-system data, the overall ratio of students to permanent seats at elementary schools stands at 91%, with about 1,400 more seats than students — if temporary-classroom buildings are included in the count.
Taken to an extreme, school officials theoretically could close not one or two but three of their smallest elementary schools and only slightly exceed 100% of the current available seats. A comprehensive look at real-world capacity is likely to run in conjunction with the upcoming boundary-adjustment process set to occur later this year.
Planning for the effort already is underway to review student populations at both elementary schools and middle schools. School staff will develop possible scenarios over the summer, with a community-engagement effort in the fall.
A School Board vote on any boundary changes likely would occur in December, with the changes taking place for the 2026-27 school year.
The upcoming boundary-change process will be the first after the School Board last year adopted more formal policies on how the decision-making process will play out.
“We’re doing [it] with a bit more structure and a bit more information that hopefully will help families with what they can expect as this unfolds,” Board member Bethany Zecher Sutton said at the Civic Federation forum.
Arlington’s 25 public elementary schools had a total of 12,646 students in kindergarten through fifth grade in February, according to statistics from the school division.
Abingdon Elementary had the largest enrollment at 744 students, followed by Cardinal Elementary at 692. Three schools — Campbell, Dr. Charles Drew and Nottingham — reported fewer than 400.
At the start of the school year, Drew had the lowest ratio of students to seats, at 62%, while eight elementary schools had rates of more than 100% and used portable classrooms to accommodate the overflow.
Current student-enrollment projections, which run through 2034-35 but can be notoriously unreliable beyond a five-year time frame, suggest that elementary-school enrollment will increase for the next few years, then begin to trail off.
School leaders are waiting until the opening of the replacement Arlington Career Center, to be known as the Grace Hopper Center, before considering boundary changes at the high-school level. No specific time frame for that process has been set, Kadera said.
