Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary on Aug. 17, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. Over the next few weeks, familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.
Emily Hamilton and Yonah Freemark approach this question quite literally. The rules that govern where we build schools determine whether kids spend their time in traffic, supervised by harried and tired parents, or whether they can walk, bike, or take the bus to school. What do we owe our children? One answer, the authors argue, starts with the obscure school siting rules that make childhood independence harder to come by.
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- Jerusalem Demsas
In 1995, downtown Durham was struggling: North Carolina’s tobacco industry was struggling, and the city had barely any shops or restaurants. But its school district took a risk on the blighted area, transforming its 73-year-old downtown high school into a new magnet school, now called Durham School of the Arts.
Over the following three decades, the school’s successes — it has expanded to serve around 1,800 students and maintained a high level of diversity — paralleled those of downtown Durham itself, which added thousands of new homes, new space for research labs, and other attractive amenities. While the school’s magnet status and special classes have been key to its success, so has its physical location: The roughly 17-acre downtown campus is integrated into the surrounding neighborhoods and easily accessible by the many students who walk or bike to class. It’s just a few blocks from the city’s main bus station, and dozens of shops and restaurants are within spitting distance.
All that will come to an end in the coming years. Instead of renovating the aging campus, the school district has chosen to move it to a new, previously forested, nearly 60-acre site north of downtown. The new facility will be surrounded by a moat of surface parking, inaccessible to the city’s bus network, and farther from most students’ homes.
Though Durham’s school board made the call in part to save money, it was also responding to a tangle of official state policies and societal norms that have resulted in schools across the country being pushed to isolated suburban fringes.
After investigating trends in school siting, we found that stories like Durham’s are more common than not. Before 1950, the median American high school in our sample sat on a 17-acre site. The typical high school built since then sits on nearly 40 acres. Similar changes have occurred among elementary schools, too, in tandem with a well-documented collapse in the share of students who walk or bike to school. In some places, it’s led to parents and kids sitting in comically long drop-off and pickup lines that contribute to traffic congestion on nearby streets.
No single rule explains how so many schools got so big and far-flung. Societal trends like rising incomes, urban sprawl, increased car use, and parental preferences have all contributed. But obscure state policies promoting minimum acreage requirements, parking rules, and drop-off lanes have made it harder to build compact, neighborhood-oriented schools. In some cases, states have all but outlawed them.
There’s an opportunity for change, though, and some states and localities are trying to reverse course — and get students back onto their own two feet.
The postwar school size boom
Our sample1 of nearly 400 U.S. schools shows that elementary school parcel sizes have increased substantially since the World War II period. Prior to 1950, the typical elementary school was set on about a five-acre site, gradually increasing to about 10 acres in the 1950s and 1960s, and reaching a peak of more than 15 acres in the 1990s. We observe a sharp decline back to a median of about 10 acres for elementary school sites in the 2000s.
