Long Beach Unified announced Thursday that Hoover Middle School will close at the end of this academic year, displacing hundreds of students and staff, according to district communications reviewed by the Long Beach Post.
The building will be repurposed for the district’s Spanish-English dual immersion program, and current Hoover students will primarily be diverted to nearby Bancroft Middle School for the 2026-27 school year, according to the communications.
The district said that interest in dual immersion is increasing, according to a message signed by Superintendent Jill Baker and sent Thursday to parents and guardians of dual immersion students in grades TK-5. Keller Middle School, the only district campus where students can continue dual immersion in a schoolwide model, cannot accommodate the growing interest in the program, Baker wrote.
In the 2027-28 school year, the Hoover site will become the dedicated dual immersion middle school hub. The dual immersion programs at Keller and Stephens Middle Schools will permanently relocate to the Hoover site, according to the district.
Current students and staff at Hoover are now navigating many unknowns. Thursday, Hoover’s principal, David Costa, convened a meeting for faculty and staff, including several district administrators, according to an email shared with the Post. There, teachers learned details of the school’s closure.
Hoover’s enrollment has dropped significantly in recent decades. When teachers union president Gerry Morrison started teaching there in 1999, he said there were around 1,400 students. Now, the school is “half empty,” he said.
According to the California Department of Education, Hoover now enrolls 513 students. Most of those will “transition to Bancroft Middle School and other designated schools” next school year, the district wrote to parents.
However, the district said there would be opportunities for parents to enroll their students elsewhere: “Families who choose to pursue enrollment at a school other than Bancroft will receive priority consideration within the annual School of Choice process.”
The path forward for teachers is even less clear.
Given the drop in enrollment and resulting empty classrooms at Hoover, “nobody’s really surprised,” Morrison said of the teachers. “They’re just anxious.” Hoover’s website lists 26 teachers, all of whom will be affected, Morrison said.
In the event of involuntary displacements like these ones, teachers get preference when vacancies open up at other schools — ahead of teachers who voluntarily transfer, Morrison said. Still, teachers will likely be “scattered all over the district,” he said and could be assigned to schools on the other side of the city. And they likely won’t find out where they’ll go until the spring or summer, once retirements and vacancies come into focus.
Morrison added that the district’s looming layoffs will also affect where teachers go. If a teacher with low seniority is laid off at another school, that could affect where a Hoover teacher with greater seniority gets reassigned. Layoffs are a separate issue, Morrison said, but a connected one.