The episode itself

Organizers in Little Rock wrote to us about the district administration's plan to close “three to four more of our beloved public schools,” and asked, more or less: what is going on here? So we recorded an emergency episode on October 9, ahead of a school board vote expected as soon as October 15. This is our writeup of the episode, the one with the receipts. At the bottom are two appendices: our full district briefing and our brief on the closure plan itself.

↓ Appendix A: the Little Rock district briefing
↓ Appendix B: the LRSD Forward closure-plan brief
↓ Where we misspoke, and the verifiable facts

What’s on the table

The plan is called LRSD Forward. The administration’s preferred version (Option 1) would close Western Hills, Mabelvale and McDermott elementary schools in fall 2027 and send their roughly 917 students to nearby schools. The district estimates it would save $4.68–5.26 million a year against a target of $5–6 million. A second option the district also supports would close Western Hills and McDermott and move Watson Elementary, the district’s most heavily Hispanic school and home of its new dual-language program, into the Mabelvale building. Options that closed or relocated Mann Magnet Middle are now marked “not recommended.” (The plan lives in a working Google Doc that the district edits in place; the Arkansas Times has the rollout.)

The district gives three reasons: enrollment is falling, it has too much building capacity, and its reserve is running low enough to risk state “fiscal distress.” Each of those is real in some sense. None of them, on inspection, is fixed by closing these three buildings.

Why Little Rock is squeezed

Let's start with what kind of district this is. Little Rock enrolled 18,964 students in 2025–26, making it the third-largest district in a state where the median district has about 850. It is in the 90th percentile of Arkansas districts for its share of Black students, the 89th for Hispanic students and the 94th for English learners, and it's in the 7th percentile for white students. Enrollment is down 22% since 2004–05, which cuts agains the overall trend among the ten largest Arkansas districts, which, together, grew 18% over that period. LRSD spends about $18,000 per pupil (94th percentile), and it serves a population unlike almost any other district in the state.

Then there’s the state. The LEARNS Act of 2023 created the Education Freedom Account voucher program, which LRSD has argued in court illegally drains its resources. LEARNS also raised the minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000. Now, teachers aren't getting rich on $50,000, and the raise was overdue. But it does place enormous financial pressure on districts across the state--the state is requiring teachers to be paid more, but the funding formula isn't keeping up. And districts therefore pay for it by squeezing everything else. That formula is the one the Arkansas Supreme Court spent the 2000s finding inadequate in the Lake View litigation.

Little Rock gets very little of that formula money. Because its property base is large (about $250,000 of assessed value per pupil, 93rd percentile) and because the state subtracts what its required 25-mill rate raises locally, foundation aid comes to only about $1,925 per pupil, a smaller amount than 92% of the districts in the state. And it’s shrinking: the state’s own funding notices show Little Rock’s foundation aid falling from about $39.3 million in FY26 to $27.6 million in the preliminary FY27 notice. Net of offsets, that’s a hit of roughly $10.5 million in one year. The district didn’t create that cliff.

Buildings don’t cost that much, but people do

We kept hammering this idea on the show: The projected savings, district administrators say, reflect the assumption that closing an elementary school eliminates about 40–45% of its past operating cost, with the rest following the students elsewhere.

Operating costs are mostly salaries and benefits, typically 85-ish% of a district’s operating budget. Closing a building saves you some heating, cooling and custodial costs, but that is not 40–45% of any building's budget. Take Western Hills: 196 students, a past operating cost of $2.94 million, and estimated savings of $1.18–1.32 million a year. At roughly $100,000 per teacher in salary and benefits, that’s the equivalent of 12 or 13 teaching positions. You don’t save $1.3 million by not heating a 196-student elementary school. You save it by employing fewer people.

The plan half-says this itself. Its own wording on Option 1: “Estimated savings achieved at the maximum could provide the minimum needed to reach the target. Some district-level personnel reductions MAY be needed to ensure the target is reached” (emphasis added). In other words, as we said in the episode, IF the rosiest estimates all come true, the plan just barely clears the bar, and if they don’t, there will be personnel cuts. The plans have not published how many positions any option eliminates.

If the real conversation is “can we run this district with fewer staff, and what would that mean for class sizes,” then that’s the conversation to have, and it would be better to have it out in the open. Closing buildings is a more politically palatable way to talk about budget cuts, but it's not a truthful one.

Two more things about the potential closure list itself:

  • McDermott is 90% full by the district’s own count, and its building isn’t in poor shape. The district chose it because the schools around it are under-filled, not because it’s empty. McDermott also absorbed about 120 students when Brady Elementary closed in 2025, so some of those families would be moved twice in three years.
  • The cost case is weaker than it looks for Mabelvale. The district cites high per-pupil costs in small schools, and that might hold for Western Hills. But in the state’s own 2024–25 school-level spending data, Mabelvale Elementary sits near the district median and costs less per pupil than three of the schools slated to take in displaced students (Chicot, Bale and Terry).

And the excess-capacity number, “approximately 23%” of building space unused, is calculated after counting the new Little Rock West High School, which doesn’t open until fall 2027. Part of the space problem is space the district is building right now.

Then there’s the research. Stanford’s Francis Pearman, whome we've cited in earlier episodes, as well, studied hundreds of California districts and found that closing schools did not improve their budgets: spending fell, but revenue fell just as fast, because a closure cost the average district about 287 students (Education Next summary). I (Derek) ran the same analysis on Wisconsin data and found no savings either (but I also couldn't replicate the enrollment-decline finding to a statistically-significant level in WI). I did find something quieter, though: Closures do affect enrollment immediately, but mainly in the youngest grades. Fewer kindergartners enroll in the district the year following a closure. Families already in the district mostly stay. Families who haven’t enrolled yet, however, do not trust the district's stability, and that fact erodes enrollment for years. We made the same argument about Minneapolis in “If You Close It, They Will Leave” and in our Minneapolis post.

What's the fund balance?

The fiscal-distress argument rests on the district’s fund balance, its operational savings account. Here are the figures we could find:

These probably measure different funds or different dates. But a community being asked to give up three schools deserves a better sense. Every version is thin: in the state’s data the reserve was 4.4% of current spending in 2024–25, the 3rd percentile in Arkansas (I erroneously said 5.4% in the episode). So the worry is genuine.

What’s less clear is what “fiscal distress” actually requires. The state rule (6 CAR Part 270) lists as its first indicator “a declining balance determined to jeopardize the fiscal integrity of a school district.” A “declining balance” just means spending exceeded revenue that year. There is no numeric threshold in the rule. The minimum reserve Little Rock is pressing against is a floor its own board set. Reserve floors are a kind of security ratchet: arbitrary when you set them, but also politically dangerous to move. This is, however, a policy choice rather than a law of nature, and it should be treated as such. The same rule also says that spending reserves on capital outlay for academic facilities “shall not be used to put the school district in fiscal distress.”

Follow the debt

Dave’s instinct on the show was to look at the debt, and the district’s FY2025 audit repays the effort. Little Rock had $490.7 million in long-term debt outstanding on June 30, 2025. Most of it is recent: a $315.9 million bond issue in December 2021, after voters extended the debt-service millage that November, and another $101.9 million in July 2024. The bonds run to 2052. They’re secured by a pledge of the district’s debt-service property taxes, but the payments, about $26.2 million a year, flow out through the general fund, the same pot that pays teachers. The district spends more on debt service than on food services ($15.9 million in FY2025), and the FY27 budget presented on September 24 raises debt service again, from $26.8 million to $31.0 million.

None of that is scandalous. Districts borrow to build, and Little Rock’s buildings needed work. But it does say something about the story the district is telling. This is not a district standing still and running out of money. It is a district that is building, including a new high school in west Little Rock, while it closes elementary schools in the southwest. Those are two halves of one plan, and the board should talk about them together. When districts present their debt in a crisis, they tend to present it as fixed. It isn’t the most fixed thing in a budget. Debt can be refinanced, restructured and re-timed in ways that salaries can’t.

Who’s on the list

The district’s stated criteria are utilization, cost per pupil and location, and its documents don’t report who attends any of the schools it names. So we checked. The three Option 1 schools are 90% free or reduced-price lunch, 67% Black, 20% Hispanic and 8% white. The fourteen elementary schools the plan doesn’t name are 69% free or reduced-price lunch and 25% white. None of the six whitest elementary schools in the district appears in any option. The plan isn’t targeting the very poorest schools either. It’s targeting the under-filled cluster in southwest Little Rock, and that cluster is poor and mostly Black and Hispanic. Appendix B has the school-by-school numbers.

That’s the analysis the NAACP Little Rock Branch has asked the district to publish. It also has a history behind it. Little Rock sued the state and its neighbors in 1982 over racial imbalance; the state’s desegregation payments, which topped $1 billion, ended only in 2018 under a 2014 settlement. Nationally, Oklahoma City v. Dowell (1991) gave districts the exit from desegregation orders, and segregation between schools within districts has been climbing back since. You can see Little Rock’s own trend in Stanford’s Segregation Explorer.

Whether or not anyone intends it, closing schools in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods while building new elsewhere is how the community will read this plan, and that reading is reasonable. Dave cites Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag describes racism as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. A school closure is a small, slow instance of exactly that.

Questions to bring to the board

  • How many positions does each option eliminate? If the savings are mostly staff, say how many and where.
  • Which reserve number is the real one, and what does it measure, and what does it mean? $6.7 million, $11 million or $14.6 million?
  • Has the district looked at restructuring or re-timing debt service before closing schools? Option 1 would save about $4.7–5.3 million a year; debt service is rising $4.2 million in a single year.
  • What happens to the buildings? Closed schools are often bought by charter operators or private schools, because the most obvious use for a school building is a school.

Little Rock is in a genuinely tight spot, squeezed by vouchers, charters, a shrinking state aid line and a formula that has never been adequate. But closing these three buildings looks to us like a radical non-solution. It is radical in its disruptive effects, but also entirely inadequate to the financial situation it supposedly addresses. The estimated savings, whatever they actually turn out to be, will be mostly jobs. The research suggests that closures accelerate enrollment decline. The reserve numbers don’t agree with each other. The burden of disruption lands on the same neighborhoods it always does. If you’re organizing in Little Rock, push the conversation off buildings and onto the actual tradeoffs: staffing, class sizes, the debt and the state. Solidarity.

Where we misspoke in the episode

We record these episodes fast, and we talk from notes. Afterward we try to check what we said against our own information. Here is where we misspoke, in the order these things come up.

  • Desegregation payments (Dave). On air: state payments to Little Rock continued “as recently as 2014.” In fact: 2014 is the year of the settlement that phased them out. The payments, more than $1 billion since 1989, ended on June 30, 2018.
  • Enrollment against peers (Derek). On air: since about 2006, Little Rock is down more than 20% while the other ten largest districts grew about 10%. In fact: since 2004–05, Little Rock is down 22.4% and the ten largest districts combined are up 18.0% (Appendix A). The gap is wider than we said.
  • Unused building space (Dave). On air: 25% of the district’s space is unused. In fact: the district’s figure is “approximately 23%,” and it counts Little Rock West High, which doesn’t open until fall 2027.
  • The reserve as a share of the budget (Derek). On air: the fund balance has fallen to 5.4% of the operating budget, at the floor of the board’s own policy. In fact: the state’s Annual Statistical Report puts the legal balance at 4.4% of current spending in 2024–25, the 3rd percentile in Arkansas (Appendix A). We have not found the board’s written reserve policy, so we can’t confirm where its floor sits.
  • What backs the bonds (Dave). On air: the bonds have “no backing levy” and no dedicated revenue source. In fact: the FY2025 audit says the district has pledged a portion of its property taxes to retire the bonds. It levies 12.4 debt-service mills, which voters extended in November 2021. What’s true in the spirit of the point: the $26.2 million a year in payments is transferred out of the general fund, the same fund that pays for operations.
  • Debt relative to revenue (Dave). On air: debt is 330% of annual revenue. In fact: $490.7 million of long-term debt against $364.1 million of FY2025 governmental-fund revenue is about 135% (about 166% of the general fund alone). The $490.7 million total is right.
  • Small stuff that was garbled or just a little off. Little Rock is at the 90th percentile for its share of Black students, not the 91st (Derek). The closures researcher is Francis Pearman (Dave). The voucher book is by Josh Cowen (Dave). The public-finance scholar Dave mentions is Tom Sgouros (Dave).

Want us to dig into your district’s budget? Send us a request. Further reading: Josh Cowen, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. This is for educational purposes only, not legal or fiscal advice.

Appendix A: The Little Rock district briefing

Our full briefing on the Little Rock School District: enrollment, who the district serves, achievement and attendance, spending and the reserve, and the property-tax base, each against the ten largest Arkansas districts and the state median. It’s embedded exactly as we distribute it. ↑ Back to top

Appendix B: The LRSD Forward closure-plan brief

Our brief on the plan itself: every option and its estimated savings, the schools on the list, who attends them compared with every other Little Rock school, the timeline, where the board and community groups stand, and every source, linked. It reflects the district’s documents as of October 1, 2026; the district edits its plan in place. ↑ Back to top