<p>As Chicago officials prepared to close 50 schools in 2013, the most at one time in American history, neighbors warned that the ramifications would go beyond worse academic outcomes for students. They worried the vacant buildings left behind would hurt their communities.</p><p>Thirteen years later, a new study from the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has found that the closings, in fact, led to a 10% increase in gun violence in the areas surrounding the vacant closed schools compared to neighborhoods with similar demographics where schools didn’t close.</p><p>The researchers found no statistically significant increase in shootings in communities where closed schools were repurposed, which city officials promised would happen.</p><p>"We found that school closure and subsequent building vacancy were associated with significant increases in firearm violence in affected neighborhoods, and that this association appeared to be partially mitigated by subsequent school buildings re-use,” the authors wrote in the study, <a class="Link" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953626005046?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" ><u>published in the journal Social Science &amp; Medicine</u></a>.</p><p>The new research adds to a pile of evidence that the closures, at best, didn’t produce transformative outcomes for students and communities, and at worst, they hurt kids and neighborhoods.</p><p>“We were interested in thinking about [closed] schools not just as a vacant lot, because they represent so much more in a community,” said Thomas Statchen, a UChicago medical student and lead author of the study. They’re public spaces and “sites of other community events, activities, playgrounds — all these things that are lost alongside a school,” he said.</p><p>A 2023 Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ series, “<a class="Link" href="https://graphics.suntimes.com/education/2023/chicagos-50-closed-schools/" target="_blank" ><u>Chicago’s 50 Closed Schools</u></a>,” found a slew of broken promises by leaders in the decade after the closings: Many buildings <a class="Link" href="https://graphics.suntimes.com/education/2023/chicagos-50-closed-schools/buildings/" target="_blank" ><u>were not repurposed</u></a>, despite vows by city officials to repurpose them as community centers, housing or other projects, with only actually 20 back in use.