The news that a second community school, Woodstock Elementary School, will now close at the end of the 2027-2028 school year is beginning to feel like a pattern. As if shutting down Phoenicia Elementary School two years ago was not harsh enough for one community, here comes another loss.

I feel a deep sense of déjà vu and disquiet. As a school head for four decades, being forced to close the charter school I led, Innovate Manhattan, was the most difficult and conflicted experience of my career. It was a zero-sum calamity: letting children down, breaking promises, deflating hopes. Albany deemed the school underperforming after three years of standardized tests and ordered us to close at the end of the 2016 academic year. No one consulted a single student, teacher or parent. Once again, technocratic thinking prevailed—experts making decisions stripped of context, meaning or lived experience, relying solely on data to make choices that affect the well-being of children, teachers and families.

If the Onteora School Board needs reminding, community schools play central roles in the life and health of their towns. They are cultural and social anchors, places where children build the social capital that will shape them for life. Woodstock Elementary and Phoenicia Elementary were—and in some ways still are—that kind of school: the kind of place any of us would want our children to grow up in. Isn’t that the aspiration? To nurture happy, curious, loving human beings?

The closings of Innovate Manhattan, Phoenicia Elementary and now Woodstock Elementary are different, but they share a common thread: these were schools that were more than schools. They were epicenters of care, literacy, responsibility and stability in students’ lives. What bureaucracies often fail to see behind the curtain of numbers is the ecosystemic role community schools play. They offer familiarity, reciprocity and belonging—places where children feel seen and valued, and where parents are welcomed as partners rather than bystanders. Where education is real, grounded and rooted in place.

We often invoke declining birth rates and fewer young families as justification for dismantling community schools, even those where children are thriving. We’re told consolidation is more efficient than smaller, more intimate environments. But doesn’t this run counter to decades of research and practice from educators like Deborah Meier, Ted Sizer and the Coalition of Essential Schools? Does this mean bigger is better? Haven’t we already learned—from empty malls, suburban sprawl, and the erosion of rural life—what happens when we sacrifice community to the demands of scale? Are local libraries next on the chopping block?

It doesn’t have to be this way. None of this is ordained.

Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General under two administrations, has called on us to recognize the urgency of rebuilding our social fabric. If we want to break the cycles of loneliness and the mental health crisis affecting young people and older adults, he argues, we must restore the spaces that foster connection, belonging and learning—spaces where children can experience the richness of human diversity and identity. A community school, by any other name.

We do have a choice. A moral one. To do right by our children and their teachers, and to refuse to acquiesce to anything less. This is what a participatory democracy requires of its citizens—including us.

David Penberg, Ph.D.

Chichester, New York