Lots of schools in Arizona are starting to get forced to shut down due to problems such as lack of kids enrolling and less money. The latest in this continuing situation is The Scottsdale Unified School District because the school board shut down two campuses. Another reason why schools are getting shut down are due to aging neighborhoods and less and less birth rates going on around Arizona. But some advocates for Public School say that’s not what the real issue is. They think instead that the focus should be on getting lawmakers to want to save more for public education. Some people believe that this is an unprecedented clip of school closures that they’ve seen over the last 18 months.
A lot of other people think closing schools is nothing new. But education leaders of Arizona disagree on why this has been happening. They believe that this is a direct result of a billion dollar voucher program that has been destabilized for what is already one of the most underfunded school systems in the entire country. And there are also conservative programs with left-wing school boards. With those, the parents become unhappy and they have choices now. So they send their children to charter schools or ESA’s to give their children an acceleration for declining enrollment.
This problem isn’t just happening in Arizona; this is happening in many states of the US, including Vermont, Colorado, California, New Mexico, and West Virginia. A lot of these schools are being shut down for mainly the following reasons: budget impasses, substantial deficits, shortened education budgets, lower birth rates, police activities, illness outbreaks, moving families, or older, more weak parts of the building starting to crumble and fall down.
But this isn’t all a bad thing because some schools are being closed for a good reason; To not have excessive administrative costs so that people can focus on their budget on teacher salaries. Arizona is really an outlier in terms of school closures. If schools continue to close down more and more often, fewer kids, teens, and young adults will have less education, less social interaction, and less prepared workforce.
Less Public Schools are harmful for our AZ students and families because kids will get less education from one school, so they’ll have to go to another school further away, so it’ll be harder to get to school, and driving further will cause more pollution to get into the atmosphere, and more cars will make more traffic on the roads, kids taking buses will have to ride the bus longer and the bus will have drive further, and there might be less neighborhood friends because some people might want to move closer to their schools so they won’t have to travel further. This can be bad because people need lots of education, an easy way to get to school, clean air, easy roads to drive on, short and simple bus rides, and enough neighborhood friends to hang out with. this stuff to be able to have a good future of what they want to do for their future. When people find something that they want to do in the future, they need to work hard in order to accomplish their goals.
Resources:
azfamily.com/2025/12/11/why-do-arizona-public-schools-keep-closing/
abc15.com/news/region-northeast-valley/scottsdale/scottsdale-school-board-discusses-next-steps-in-school-closures
azmirror.com/2025/10/06/neighborhood-schools-are-closing-across-arizona-its-because-of-vouchers/
