School Portfolio Change Amid Declining Enrollment – AASA School Administrator Magazine
ERS Partner Angela King Smith was featured in the September 2025 issue of School Administrator Magazine, the official publication of AASA, The School Superintendents Association. The theme of the issue is “Managing Decline,” and examines solutions and strategies for superintendents handling enrollment decline, school mergers and closures in their school districts.
Angela’s article, “School Portfolio Change Amid Declining Enrollments,” highlights how two districts—Hartford Public Schools and JeffCo Public Schools—used a student-centered strategy while addressing underused facilities. The article draws on insights from our “The Strategic Small School” publication, which offers insights into the small school conundrum, how to make small schools work, and a system-level approach to optimizing small schools.
The article also highlights how leaders should approach key factors like community engagement, communicating transparently, and investigating the disproportionate impact on students and the community.
Like many school district leaders across the country, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, former superintendent of Hartford Public Schools in Connecticut, has faced the turmoil that comes with declining enrollment, a significant budget deficit and school closures. Tracy Dorland, her counterpart in Jefferson County Public Schools in Golden, Colo., braved similarly hard times.
Driven by a commitment to improve the lives of more students, both Torres-Rodriguez and Dorland view these leadership struggles as opportunities to create better schools.
These days, too many schools have too few students, which means not enough resources to offer the kind of robust, enriching experiences students deserve. In our nonprofit organization’s consulting work with hundreds of school districts, we hear this observation with increasing frequency. In a 2024 network convening with various district leaders, we spoke with Torres-Rodriguez and Dorland, who each reflected on previous experience with strategic portfolio change as a critical way to address this challenge…