by Jacob Espinoza

Salem-Keizer Public Schools may close up to eight elementary schools in the fall of 2027. That would come after a public process that district leaders announced this week. Superintendent Andrea Castañeda told me the reason comes down to the math. 

Last year’s graduating class was about 3,330 students, while the kindergarten class coming in behind it was around 2,300. 

“We actually no longer need to operate 65 school sites,” Castañeda told reporters at a media briefing, framing the move as a chance to concentrate resources into fewer, better-staffed buildings.

So why close schools? Empty seats don’t save much money on their own.

A half-full school still needs a principal, a custodian, a library and heating. The district’s argument is that consolidating students into fewer buildings lets it fully staff and fully use each building in the district. And this is where they say the real benefit lies.

There is no list yet

The announcement marks the start of a process, not a decision. 

“There is no list of proposed sites,” Castañeda said. A tentative timeline has the school board taking up closure criteria and policy at an Aug. 8 retreat. An initial list of schools that could close would come in October, and a board vote is expected in December after further community engagement.

Notably, Salem-Keizer does not currently have any board policy governing how to close a school. The retreat is designed to create one from scratch.

The number reflects enrollment math and how full the district’s buildings are. It’s not a fixed target, Chief Operations Officer Paul Odenthal said at the briefing. The enrollment losses have been concentrated in elementary grades. 

There's local data behind that trend. Birth records from Salem Hospital, where most babies in the area are delivered, show a steep drop over the past decade, from 4,496 births in 2016 to 2,834 in 2025. That’s a decline of roughly 37%. Most of that fall came in a single year: births dropped by about 1,000 between 2016 and 2017, then settled into a slower, steady decline, hovering near 3,000 a year through the early 2020s before dipping to their lowest point in 2025.

It's an imperfect measure. Not every baby born at Salem Hospital ends up in Salem-Keizer schools, and not every district student was born there. But it's a rough preview of the pipeline. Because those births feed into kindergarten about five years later, the roughly 3,050 births in 2020 are close to the kids entering kindergarten now, while the 2,834 born in 2025 won't reach a classroom until around 2030. Those are smaller classes district leaders say they’re already planning for.

By the district’s own projections, enrollment will keep dropping into the 35,000 range over the next five years before stabilizing in the low 30,000s about a decade out. Salem-Keizer currently operates 42 elementary schools, and Odenthal said its under-capacity buildings have room to absorb displaced students across the district.

Online, some parents have asked a fair question: if enrollment is down, why do classrooms still feel full? The district’s answer is consolidation. When a school loses students, it staffs fewer teachers per grade. The remaining kids get grouped into the classes that stay, and the emptied classrooms get repurposed for other uses. So the classes stay full even as a building has fewer students.

Bigger than Salem

Salem-Keizer isn’t alone in this. Between 2020 and 2025, Oregon public school enrollment has dropped by more than 37,000 students statewide, according to OPB. That’s a decline researchers say was already coming because of the state’s falling birth rate, which then got compounded by the pandemic.

When OPB asked why students are leaving, the honest answer from researchers was that nobody knows precisely. A 2025 Brookings report found that 12% of Oregon’s school-aged children were “unaccounted for.” That means they are living in the state but not on either public or private school rolls. This is the highest share of any state.

Homeschooling is one piece of it. The Oregon Department of Education has said homeschooling families jumped 72% in the first two years of the pandemic, and a Johns Hopkins research lab found homeschooling nationally is now growing at more than double its pre-pandemic rate.

Locally, there are at least hints that some families are choosing private options. Tim Peterson, superintendent of Salem Academy Christian Schools, told WHS the private school has grown steadily since the pandemic, from about 646 students in 2020-21 to 801 this past year. It’s expanding its building toward a roughly 912-student capacity. He said the private-school leaders he meets with periodically report a similar upward trend, though he acknowledged he doesn’t have enrollment figures from individual schools, and aggregate private-school data in Oregon is hard to come by. He also said Salem Academy hasn’t seen the birth-rate-driven gap Salem-Keizer describes: his graduating and incoming classes stay roughly consistent year to year.

A heavy caveat belongs on all of this. Salem Academy’s growth is one school’s self-reported experience, and Peterson said its new students come from several places: public schools, other private schools, and kids aging out of elementary-only private schools, so it’s not a measure of how many students left Salem-Keizer specifically. 

More broadly, Oregon barely tracks the alternatives. The state only requires families to notify their education district once, when they first start homeschooling. There’s no annual update, so state figures capture new homeschoolers only and can’t say how many Oregon kids are homeschooled at any given moment. The Brookings numbers are statewide census-based estimates, not a Salem-Keizer count, and one gap they can’t close is how many families simply left Oregon versus pulled their kids from public school. 

So while Salem-Keizer’s decline is clearly part of a real statewide pattern, public data can’t yet show how many of this district’s lost students went to homeschool, went private, or moved away. 

Not about layoffs, officials say

Pressed repeatedly on the financial logic, Castañeda pushed back on the idea that closures are a way to save money by cutting staff. Because resources in the district are “almost always equivalent to staff,” she said, most employees at a closed school would move with their students to a new building rather than lose their jobs. Asked directly whether major layoffs were expected, she answered flatly: “No.”

The savings, officials argue, come less from personnel than from operating fewer under-filled buildings, and they say the payoff is schools staffed well enough to keep art teachers, social workers, organized recess and after-school programming.

What comes next

The district has closed schools before, most recently during the recession over a decade ago. Officials say community engagement will ramp up through the fall, with in-person meetings in affected neighborhoods once a proposed list exists.

If a school is ultimately closed, students would be reassigned to other Salem-Keizer neighborhood schools. The district is promising transition support, school visits, transportation planning and staffing coordination, to soften the move.

“We cannot ignore the reality of declining birth rate,” Castañeda said. “But what we can do is create great conditions for us to be an amazing school district.”