School Shutterings and Black Community Resistance Amid Localized Dispossession and Disinvestment

• In Event: School Shuttering and the Fight for Black Public Educational Access, Improvement, and Protection

Abstract

We highlight emerging findings from our community-engaged, qualitative case study of how a predominantly Black community negotiates, adapts, and/or resists state efforts to shutter their “Middle Lake” school district. Literature suggests understanding schooling experiences of students of color requires looking beyond urban spaces to suburban and rural geographies (Ewing & Green, 2021; Nickson, 2021). Our study takes up this charge to elevate Black experiences and affirm Black knowledge as a means to document valuable stories of Black educational life in ways that connect policy to lived experience. Permanent school shutterings are within the historical fight for educational access, equity, and racial justice. As such, we aim to understand dynamics related to Black community agency and efficacy in efforts to reform and protect public education.

We draw upon theories related to structural violence, the politics of disposability, Black geographies, and Black community resistance to address intersecting factors related to race, class, education, and land use (Authors et al., 2023; Means, 2008; McKittrick & Woods, 2007). We also address Black agency and coalition building to consider how Black communities experiencing concentrated poverty and public school disinvestment generate localized interventions to shutterings.

Employing a qualitative case study design to offer a holistic portrait of Middle Lake School District and its town, we leverage data from observations of community events and meetings, policy documents and historical artifacts, and nearly 30 ongoing interviews with educators, civic officials, youth, and other community members (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011). We contextualize and analyze Middle Lake school shuttering events from historical, sociocultural, and political perspectives of our participants using the constant comparative process (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014). Authors further analyze community-proposed interventions and alternatives to shutterings, member-checking emergent analyses with interviewees (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011).

Our preliminary findings demonstrate that students use their voices and agency to create music videos, art, articles, books, and social media about the importance of keeping their schools open. Middle Lake community members have been vocal at town halls, school board meetings, and on social media to express their discontent for non-democratic state intervention policies and their desire to protect their public schools. Community members also express concern about shuttering leading to appropriation of the town’s spaces and resources, especially the local high school. In addition to starting their own organizations, hosting various community forums, and purchasing local buildings, they also initiated petitions with a multigenerational following, including students, alumni, parents, civic leaders, and elders.

Permanent shutterings–and their harm to Black students and communities–are generally ignored, erased, or framed to fit hegemonic, neoliberal narratives of achievement decline and school mismanagement. They are rarely discussed in relation to racism, geographic displacement, and state violence. Further, despite waves of school shutterings in the U.S., few studies examine community-proposed alternatives to shutterings. We address this gap by exploring community responses and resistance to school shuttering threats and policies. This study offers implications for education policymakers, researchers, and communities of color immersed in shuttering debates and facing shuttering prospects.

Authors

• Camille M. Wilson, University of Michigan

• Tonya Kneff-Chang, University of Michigan

• Mara D. Johnson, University of Michigan