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