Dozens of Long Beach Unified parents, leaders and community members attended a school board meeting Wednesday to oppose the district’s recommendation to close two schools.
Families urged the school board to vote against closing Gompers and Edison elementary schools at the end of the 2026-27 school year, a recommendation administrators made recently because both schools operate well below capacity, the district said. Steady enrollment decline has left LBUSD with more buildings than it needs for its 59,828 students, district officials said, and school closures help “right-size” the district while also staunching its financial hemorrhage, administrators said at the meeting.
But parents emphasized that communities are built around schools — not the other way around. School closures reverberate through neighborhoods, they said, disrupting students’ friend groups, parents’ support networks and staff members’ careers.
Amanda Druken, a single mother of a fourth grader at Edison Elementary, said the high cost of living in Long Beach means she must choose between paying rent and owning a car. As a result, she walks her son to school, as many parents in Edison’s Willmore neighborhood do, she said. Commuting further, even to a nearby school, could add a significant commute on foot for parents and children and eat into Druken’s workday, she said.
She acknowledged the district’s financial reality: “You can’t get blood from a rock,” she said. Yet even if school closures help balance the budget, “they’re putting those financial burdens back into the community” — without any guarantee students’ educations will improve, she added.
Parents who spoke at the meeting worried that school changes would be particularly disruptive for students with disabilities and that they may not receive the same services at a new school. Brian Moskovitz, the district’s chief academic officer, assured parents that their students would receive services uninterrupted. But some parents said that any change in schools represents a disruption.
Lakewood Mayor Jeff Wood attended the meeting to stand in solidarity with Gompers parents and to emphasize that the Lakewood City Council strongly opposes the closure of Gompers, which is in Lakewood. The city has no influence on the school board’s decision, but he felt an obligation to fight for his constituents, he said.
Some parents worried the proposed closures would not ameliorate the budget crisis. Two brought up recent research from Stanford University, which examined California district data from 2011-2019 and found that school closures did not, on average, meaningfully improve district finances.
The research also showed that closures led to enrollment losses of 287 students, on average. At the meeting, some parents said they plan to homeschool their children if their schools close, and others told the Long Beach Post they worry more parents will leave the district if more resources aren’t invested back into school communities.
Gompers parent Jamie Lugo-Gifford told the Post she wanted a more detailed accounting of what alternatives the district had exhausted before recommending school closure.
Many parents pressed the district on its capacity analysis. Gompers operates at 38% capacity, according to a district PowerPoint, yet this includes portable classrooms, which parents said should not be counted. Excluding portable classrooms, Gompers’ capacity rises to 52%, said David Miranda, who oversees facilities and operations. Yet that still falls below a key threshold the district used in its districtwide capacity analysis, Miranda said at the board meeting.
District administrators and school board members acknowledged the gravity of the decision before them, and did not deny that closing schools would have dramatic impacts on hundreds of students, families, staff and neighbors.
Yet LBUSD has far more school buildings than districts of a similar size, said superintendent David Zaid. The district used to accommodate nearly 100,000 students over two decades ago, and now educates fewer than 60,000. Elk Grove Unified, which has an enrollment of approximately 63,000 students across Sacramento County, has 70 schools, Zaid said. Long Beach Unified has 83. That means the district must spread more resources across more campuses, he said. And although it is painful, school closures are part of the process of accommodating the shrinking student population, he said.
Board member Doug Otto put the problem more succinctly: “Let’s face it. We don’t have the money,” he said. “The question is: what are we going to do?”
The board is expected to vote on whether or not to close the schools at its next meeting on Oct. 21.