What the data shows
Between the 2017-18 and 2024-25 school years, 7,962 US public schools closed permanently, displacing an estimated 2.03 million students. The figure comes from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD). Any school with an NCES ID active in 2017-18 but absent from the 2024-25 file is counted as a closure.
Roughly one in thirteen public schools that operated at the start of the period was gone by the end. The losses were not evenly distributed. A handful of states absorbed most of the closures, while several rural states lost a disproportionate share of their school stock to consolidation.
States hit hardest by total count
California led in absolute terms with 1,286 closures, followed by Texas (776), Florida (495), and Michigan (440). Together these four states accounted for roughly 38% of all US closures.
California's number reflects two converging trends. K-12 enrollment has been falling for years and accelerated after COVID, and the state's unusually high share of small charter schools close at higher rates than traditional district schools.
States hit hardest by share
By percentage of schools closed, the picture looks different. Vermont lost 47.9% of its 2017-18 schools by 2024-25, the highest rate in the country. The driver is Act 46, a state-led consolidation push that merged dozens of small supervisory unions into larger unified districts and retired the underlying school IDs in the process.
Puerto Rico (24.8%), North Dakota (16.6%), South Carolina (12.8%), and West Virginia (12.4%) also posted closure rates well above the national average of 7.9%. The Puerto Rico figure traces back to the post-Hurricane Maria consolidation program; North Dakota and West Virginia reflect the long-running attrition of rural one-room and K-8 schools.
Three forces driving closures
School closures are not a single phenomenon. They are the result of three pressures running at the same time: structural enrollment decline driven by lower birth rates, post-COVID disenrollment that pushed marginal schools below their viability thresholds, and deliberate state policy aimed at consolidating small districts. Untangling those forces is what any community trying to predict its own risk has to do.
The state-level table above shows the breakdown for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The full per-school list is available as a CSV download, with every closed school across all states and its last-recorded enrollment, district, and city.
Methodology
Source: NCES Common Core of Data (CCD), public school universe files for 2017-18 and 2024-25, the most recent year for which the CCD is complete. A "closure" here is a school with an NCES ID present in the 2017-18 universe and absent from the 2024-25 universe. That captures permanent closures, consolidations where the original school IDs were retired, and reorganizations where a school's identifier changed.
Closures do not include schools that merely changed names while retaining their NCES ID, nor schools that moved physical locations under the same ID. They also do not include schools created during the seven-year window and subsequently closed, since those never appeared in the 2017-18 baseline.
Enrollment for displaced students is the 2017-18 reported enrollment for each closed school. A small number of closed schools had no recorded enrollment in the 2017-18 file; these are counted in the total closure count but excluded from the student-displacement total.