CCISD leaders say the district is shrinking faster than expected, with many campuses now sitting half empty. Here’s why enrollment is dropping and what comes next.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Corpus Christi ISD leaders say the district is shrinking faster than expected, with some campuses now sitting half empty and others using only a fraction of the classrooms they were built to hold.

RELATED: CCISD announces community meeting times, dates for ‘School Consolidation Plan’

Deputy Superintendent Sandra Clement told board members this week that CCISD once served close to 40,000 students, but enrollment has continued to slide. The district is now below 32,000 students, and demographic projections show the numbers continuing to fall.

“Now we’re sitting at 32,000 students and below,” Clement said. “Our demographic studies tell us we’re getting even smaller. The birth rates are low. COVID — we lost almost 3,000 kids; they just moved to other places.”

Clement said the steady decline has left the district with large sections of unused space across multiple campuses.

“Many of them are sitting at less than 50% of the campus being used,” she said. “We’ve got a middle school with 36% of that campus being used, and it is a large, newer middle school with a ton of empty classrooms.”

Administrators said they have reached a point where they can no longer avoid a conversation that has lingered for years: the potential consolidation or closure of campuses to match the district’s shrinking enrollment.

“We, at a certain point, had to face what we have not wanted to do,” Clement said. “We have not wanted to consider starting to talk about the consolidation of campuses.”

Not everyone agrees with how the district has managed its facilities. Dr. Nancy Vera, president of the Corpus Christi American Federation of Teachers, said CCISD failed to maintain buildings and plan responsibly for the ongoing decline.

“I taught in a school that was in terrible shape, the old Carroll High School — it was horrid,” Vera said. “But the fact of the matter is, CCISD has failed to do its due diligence over the course of the last 10 to 15 years.”

District leaders said no decisions have been made, and any proposal to consolidate schools would involve community input, enrollment projections and a review of long-term financial needs.