![\"Shelle](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/MIA_2026-07-22AD0074RainbowParkElementarycopy.JPG\" "\\"Shelle")
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Shelle Higgs stands outside of Rainbow Park Elementary on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. Higgs attended elementary school there. So did her parents and her kids. The public school, located in Miami Gardens, is in a large suburban setting. The school is one of nine public schools recently closed by Miami-Dade County.<\/p>\n
Photography by AL DIAZ<\/p>\n
adiaz@miamiherald.com<\/p>\n
Crystal Walker sat with her parents in Rainbow Park Elementary\u2019s cafetorium last summer, watching her third-grade daughter dance in an end-of-year showcase on a stage known to all three generations of the family.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a full-circle moment,\u201d Walker said, \u201cbecause we all sat right there in that cafeteria, one time or another, eating breakfast or lunch.\u201d<\/p>\n
First-graders in tutus twirled and bent into plies to Whitney Houston\u2019s \u201cGreatest Love of All<\/a>,\u201d showing off what they\u2019d learned in the school\u2019s dance-magnet program. Older students leapt across the stage to fast-paced R&B songs. A troupe donned cowboy attire and brought the crowd to its feet as they stomped out the beat of a country-infused pop hit.<\/p>\n Walker, 40, called it \u201ca legacy memory.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, the Rainbow Park experience as they knew it will remain just that: a memory.<\/p>\n Seventy years after it opened its doors to the community, Rainbow Park was one of nine underpopulated schools closed or consolidated<\/a> this summer by Miami-Dade County Public Schools, which is facing steep enrollment declines and resulting financial pressures. District leaders have signaled that more cuts are likely to come.<\/p>\n Seven of the nine shuttered and consolidated institutions had majority-Black populations, even though Black students make up about 20% of enrollment<\/a> in district-run schools. The same trend is evident throughout the county, where 22 of the 30 schools with the lowest utilization rates are located in Black communities, placing them on the front end of a problem being felt throughout South Florida.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was real potential at the school,\u201d said Walker. \u201cNow, it just feels like a defeat. It feels sad.\u201d<\/p>\n In February 2016, Rainbow Park Elementary had 409 students; ten years later, it had 151, per district data. Last year, almost three quarters of Rainbow Park\u2019s campus was unused, according to a state estimate. Most of the other schools closed or merged saw similar declines.<\/p>\n The pressures to close schools like these are intense. Fewer students means less taxpayer money for schools, which Superintendent Jose Dotres says threatens to short-change kids.<\/p>\n Closures allow the district to cut spending on building upkeep and reduce its biggest expense \u2014 staff count \u2014 without explicitly laying employees off. Plus, moving students from under-enrolled schools to bigger ones allows the district to provide them with more services like extracurriculars and specialty classes.<\/p>\n Jude Bruno, the new president of Florida\u2019s statewide Parent-Teacher Association, has seen it from both sides. He was an alternate on the committee responsible for boundary changes and closure recommendations last year, and his child\u2019s Miami Gardens school was placed on the \u201cinitially advised\u201d list, essentially warning that it may close or merge soon.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had to make the decision of, \u2018Do we … run the risk of moving him if they decide to close that school, or do we bite the bullet and do that now?\u2019 I\u2019m dealing with that reality,\u201d Bruno said.<\/p>\n But he understands it.<\/p>\n \u201cThe district, as they\u2019ve shared and I\u2019ve agreed, has the responsibility to evaluate how they use resources. There\u2019s no winning in this conversation,\u201d Bruno said.<\/p>\n The Community impact<\/p>\n Rainbow Park\u2019s closure is in some ways a flash point in the story of a changing neighborhood molded by economic and social pressures.<\/p>\n The school anchors a triangle-shaped neighborhood southwest of the Golden Glades interchange where the streets are lined with short palm trees, laurel oaks and single-family houses, modest and colorful. At one point, it was filled with big families, though those days are mostly gone.<\/p>\n \u201cThe district said even if every household that was in Rainbow Park\u2019s current boundaries went to Rainbow Park, it still wouldn\u2019t be over 50% utilized,\u201d Walker said. \u201cFortunately or unfortunately, people are having fewer kids now. It\u2019s just not as populated as it was.\u201d<\/p>\n Shelle Higgs, who grew up in the neighborhood and can see the school\u2019s front door from her house, describes the community where she was raised like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.<\/p>\n Higgs, a 43-year-old Publix employee, grew up walking to Rainbow Park. Her uncles attended the school, and she knows many other parents thanks to the walks to and from campus. She can still rattle off the names of her teachers from Kindergarten through fifth grade.<\/p>\n The school has even grown up with her: Her children\u2019s Rainbow Park principal was the daughter of her old principal.<\/p>\n Now, when classes resume on Thursday, her two youngest will attend Bunche Park for 4th and 5th grade. It\u2019s not far \u2014 0.7 miles North as the crow flies \u2014 but getting there involves crossing busy 22nd Avenue, which makes a mother worry.<\/p>\n \u201cI wish I could just put all the kids that stayed in this neighborhood at the one school down the street from my house so they could reopen back up. I feel like it was better and self-sufficient for the ones who stayed in this neighborhood because now you have to get up in the morning and get in your car, drive your kids around the corner, down the street, deal with traffic,\u201d Higgs said. \u201cYou used to walk your kid to school. It [built] a sense of being bonded with your kids.\u201d<\/p>\n Asheley Hepburn did not attend Rainbow Park, but the pastor of Magnolia Park Church of Christ \u2014 located just a couple blocks from the school \u2014 knows all about it from his church membership.<\/p>\n \u201cTheir responsibility is making sure kids get educated, and to be able to do it within budget. So, I get it,\u201d said Hepburn, a former budget director for St. Lucie County. \u201cBut are some of the members of my church happy? No.\u201d<\/p>\n Academic effect<\/p>\n There is some evidence that school closures can be harmful to students.<\/p>\n A study from Houston University economics PhD Jeonghyeok Kim<\/a> analyzed over 300 school closures in Texas. It found that, by age 26, those students who experienced a school closure were 1.8 percentage points less likely to graduate from high school, 1.4 points less likely to attend college and 1 point less likely to be employed.<\/p>\n Other studies \u2014 including two from the University of Chicago\u2019s<\/a> Consortium on School Research<\/a> \u2014 have shown modest short-term and long-term negative<\/a> effects, but also note that outcomes are most reliant on where students end up afterward. In Miami-Dade\u2019s case, that has been the most common message from the administration: These are difficult decisions, but we\u2019re sending students to places with better resources.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we have to consolidate a school, we do it because, yes, [it\u2019s] under-enrolled. But what that under-enrollment creates, it creates a school that is less resourced,\u201d Dotres, the district superintendent, said in an interview earlier this summer. \u201cThat\u2019s basically the trigger of the majority of the decisions that go into when we have to consolidate schools.\u201d<\/p>\n In Rainbow Park\u2019s case, the students going there last year have been assigned to higher-performing elementary schools.<\/a><\/p>\n Fourth graders at Rainbow Park posted state reading and math assessment scores<\/a> well below the state average. Now students previously assigned to attend Rainbow Park will be assigned to Bunche Park Elementary, which outpaces Rainbow Park in both exams, and Robert B. Ingram Elementary, which tests better than both and easily clears the state average in reading.<\/p>\n Both were rated \u201cA\u201d schools by the state in 2026, while Rainbow Park was one of relatively few in the district given a \u201cC\u201d grade.<\/p>\n The demographic correlation<\/p>\n The loss of a school is something most community members can feel. Northwestern University Professor Sally Nuamah<\/a> worked to quantify it in her book, \u201cClosed for Democracy: How Mass School Closure Undermines the Citizenship of Black Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n She counts a school as a true resource for a community, and in the case of a public school, it\u2019s not one the community is likely to ever get back once it\u2019s gone. A closure is, she says, the \u201clast nail in the coffin\u201d of a withdrawal of public services from Black communities.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just racial categories that correlate with school closures.<\/p>\n Of the five schools that are closing, all are majority Black and are less affluent than the average traditional public school. At all five, at least two-thirds of students qualify for free or reduced lunch \u2014 well above the roughly 52% district average.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also true that schools with higher free and reduced lunch populations are more likely to be under-enrolled.<\/p>\n In the cities Nuamah closely studied for her book<\/a>, such as Philadelphia and Chicago, closures disproportionately happened in schools that were in Black, less affluent neighborhoods. She said that\u2019s no coincidence.<\/p>\n \u201cThese people don\u2019t have bad intentions, theoretically. But I think politics reminds us about who matters, who is important, who the state is serving. The state has a lot of people they\u2019re serving, but all the people they\u2019re serving aren\u2019t equal,\u201d Nuamah said.<\/p>\n Bruno, who is the first elected Black man and Haitian American to his position, has a somewhat different view than Nuamah.<\/p>\n He said he believes the closures and consolidations have been \u201cpurely on the numbers\u201d and aren\u2019t intentionally targeted towards Black communities.<\/p>\n Bruno guessed that the district\u2019s increased emphasis on magnet schools may have hurt enrollment at some predominantly Black schools, but he says the issue \u201cboils down to\u201d cost of living. Those schools may not be losing population to charter or private schools as much as they\u2019re losing them to nearby counties, the Orlando area or other states.<\/p>\n \u201c[Much] of our urban core and Black population is in the north. If they\u2019re not finding opportunities here, they\u2019re moving north and north and north until they find them,\u201d Bruno said.<\/p>\n Charter schools may not play as big a role as some would guess. At just 7.6%, charter schools have a much lower Black student population than traditional public schools, which are 20% Black.<\/p>\n Whatever the reason, enrollment loss as well as closures and consolidations have been most stark in Black communities thus far.<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/MIA_2026-07-22AD0001RainbowParkElementary.JPG\" "\\"MIA_2026-07-22AD0001RainbowParkElementary.JPG\\"")
An aerial view of Rainbow Park Elementary on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. The public school, located in Miami Gardens, is in a large suburb setting.The school is one of nine public schools recently closed by Miami Dade County. Photography by AL DIAZ adiaz@miamiherald.com <\/p>\n![\"Superintendent](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/MIA_8DAV_FIRST_DAY.jpeg\" "\\"MIA_8DAV_FIRST_DAY\\"")
Superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools Jose L. Dotres, right, speaks with Principal James Dominique, left, during the first day of school at Miami Edison High on Thursday, August 15, 2024, in Miami, Fla. D.A. Varela dvarela@miamiherald.com <\/p>\n