Schools Closed, Buildings Sat Empty — And Gun Violence Rose, Study Finds

The former Matthew Henson Elementary School in North Lawndale has sat vacant since it closed in June 2013.

The building’s windows are boarded up with plywood, its paint is chipping away and its basketball hoops are torn and rusted. Demetrius Hobson, Henson’s principal before its closure, said he’s seen broken glass littering the school’s empty playground, the garden unkempt and graffiti dotting the exterior in the 13 years since its closure.

“When you go over there and you drive around, you see this dead zone in the middle of the neighborhood,” Hobson said. “From a vibrant, bustling center of support for the children and for the adults in the community to just blight.”

Henson, 1326 S. Avers Ave., was one of 50 Chicago public schools that closed amid the largest mass closure of public schools in the nation’s history in 2013, more than half of which remained vacant for the decade that followed, despite the city setting a goal to sell or tear down all closed buildings by 2017. Most of the closed schools, like Henson, were in majority-Black areas.

MKB Business Strategies agreed to buy Henson for $25,000 in December and plans to demolish the building to replace it with housing units. Eight former schools are still unoccupied and publicly owned.

“It’s just an abandoned space that no one has done anything with, as was promised when schools were closed,” Hobson said.

Now, 13 years after the closures, researchers at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that neighborhoods surrounding these long-vacant buildings saw a 10 percent increase in gun violence, compared to similar neighborhoods where schools didn’t close.

Chicago Public Schools educators say these findings are unsurprising and confirm the alarm bells they raised when fighting the 2013 school closures.

“These communities deserve an apology for the chaos and the disinvestment in them,” Hobson said.

CPS spokesperson Mary Ann Fergus said the district and the city formed an advisory committee aimed at redeveloping the closed school properties, which includes real estate professionals, community members and elected officials. CPS evaluates proposals for the properties based on financial feasibility, community benefits, alignment with local planning and community input, she said.

CPS has worked to repurpose the eight remaining former school properties, getting bids for five of the sites this year. The district will present the bids to the community via meetings before they potentially progress.

Fergus said CPS implements protective systems and support services, like the citywide expansion of early childhood education and programs aimed at helping students to return to and complete their education, in response to community violence to mitigate trauma.

“Chicago Public Schools is dedicated to creating safe and supportive learning environments for students, teachers, and staff,” Fergus said in an emailed statement. “CPS recognizes the trauma related to and following the closure of approximately 50 District schools in 2013.”

Study Findings

Thomas Statchen, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Chicago and the study’s lead author, said researchers analyzed the Police Department’s gun crime data from 2010 to 2019, looking at the density of shootings within half a mile of a school building.

Taking into account factors like poverty rates and racial demographics to ensure researchers compared neighborhoods similarly, they saw that trends in gun violence near schools diverged after the 2013 school closures, with the areas near closed schools seeing a 10 percent uptick in violence.

Statchen said that while school closures were framed as an academic issue at the time, the findings show how deeply schools anchor their neighborhoods and suggest that the closures left gaps in the public spaces that help hold communities together.

“Schools also play a much larger role in a community,” Statchen said. “They’re places where parents get to know each other in pick-up lines or playgrounds. They’re public spaces within neighborhoods that have fewer and fewer of those available for public meetings, conversations, things like that.”

Statchen said there’s a long history of research, particularly in Chicago, on how the social fabric of a neighborhood affects gun violence, which the study adds to by demonstrating the effect of those weakened community ties.

“When you have lower degrees of interconnectedness with your neighbors, belief that you and your neighbors can make a difference in your community, things like collective efficacy, you see higher rates of firearm violence,” Statchen said.

Elizabeth Tung, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and a study co-author, said the research didn’t see the same increase in gun violence surrounding closed schools that had been repurposed. One example is Anthony Overton Center for Excellence, 4927 S. Indiana Ave. in Bronzeville, which was converted into a community hub.

“Reuse seemed to mitigate, at least in part, the impact of school closure,” Tung said. “Whereas for the schools that remained vacant, and you had a massive vacant lot and an empty building, that’s where you really saw the increase in firearm violence.”

Tung and Statchen said they hope the study’s findings add nuance to decisions about school closures by underscoring that the consequences extend beyond academics. They said the results should prompt policymakers to weigh whether closing a school is appropriate in the first place and to make the reuse of a school building building — as a community hub or gathering space — a central part of any closure plan.

“We still need to think about those individual students, but I think that we also need to think about the neighborhood effects in the communities that are impacted as well, because it’s not just individual students that are impacted by school closure,” Tung said. “And then for every student who does well at a new school, there’s probably another student who never makes it to school because of transportation issues and lack of access.”

More Than Just A School

Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates said the study “rightfully” captures the trauma and ongoing consequences of school closures for Black children and Black neighborhoods.

Gates — who served as the union’s political director in 2013 and protested in hopes of stopping the closures — said she worried at the time that violence would rise because the South and West side communities targeted for closures had already endured generations of disinvestment, leading to more students experiencing homelessness and many others traveling long distances each day to get to school.

“I wish they would listen to Black people. I wish they would listen to educators,” Gates said. “I wish that people in power would understand the legacy of the impacts of this trauma of closing public schools.”

Gates began teaching history in 2004 at Englewood Technical Prep Academy High School, a public school that closed in 2008 — one of 18 schools shuttered that year.

Gates said Englewood Tech took in every student who lived within its attendance boundary, and its closure stripped the neighborhood of that guarantee. Some former students were excluded from local schools due to selective enrollment, and some encountered violence when they had to travel into other neighborhoods to attend school, she said.

Chicago has had a moratorium on school closures since 2021, but that expires at the close of the 2026-27 academic year. Gates said the study’s findings should push city and state leaders to keep the moratorium in place.

Gates said as November’s Chicago Board of Education elections loom, candidates should have clear plans for reopening vacant buildings as community anchors and investing in after-school programs that keep students connected to their schools.

“I think this study gives us a lot of evidence, beyond the evidence that we’ve had previously, to say that anyone who supports school closings as a policy, that those people intend to do harm to Black families,” Gates said.

Hobson, the former Henson principal, said the study’s findings didn’t surprise him because the 2013 decision to close 50 schools created pockets of blight across Chicago with little police presence, making them attractive to criminally minded people. He said some of the school’s students had family members involved in street gangs with boundaries that shifted block to block, and the closures forced children and families to cross lines daily.

Hobson said he had only been principal for a year prior to the school’s closure and had hoped to change its culture. He reached out to his network and brought in 100 volunteers from Teach for America, Deloitte & Touche and AT&T to paint the building and rearrange storage rooms into intervention centers.

Hobson said the school forged a partnership with the Greater Chicago Food Depository to provide free groceries to community members every week and a high-quality health clinic in partnership with Erie Family Health Centers for the neighborhood.

“You have a community that’s been so disinvested in over the years, and they can see other communities being invested in,” Hobson said. “It’s a message being communicated to the people in that community about their value.”

Tenesha Hatter, Henson’s former assistant principal, said Henson’s closure was devastating. It was a multi-generational school where some students’ parents and grandparents had also attended, she said. She said they “couldn’t keep people out of the school” — there was a parent room that families used every day to work and congregate because they wanted to be in the building.

“It really was more than just a school,” Hatter said. “It was really a place where the community felt safe and felt that they could contribute to it and that we could contribute to the community.”

That Henson had been left vacant “speaks volumes” and signals that the city doesn’t care about the community, Hatter said. She said she hopes the city invests in finding a better hub for the community in an effort to begin to reconcile the harm the closure caused.

“I think it’s the responsibility of CPS to now, over a decade later, try to make amends to that community for destroying it or demolishing it,” Hatter said.

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This story was originally published by Block Club Chicago and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.