A major challenge facing communities across the Province of Ontario is the provision of educational facilities for students while balancing community-planning objectives. In recent years, it has become clear that Provincial and local policies coupled with demographic and financial pressures are leading to more closures and the loss of the public resources that are local schools. In the last three years, 172 schools have been slated for closure. In addition, public outcry has grown in volume as the Accommodation Review process is cited as an unsatisfying exercise for all those involved. From a planning perspective, schools are an irreplaceable resource in a community, yet current policy structures have left planners with no power to protect public assets while school boards are limited in the ability to find creative alternative solutions to closure. Therefore, to gain a broader understanding of the policies and processes governing Accommodation Reviews, this research was guided by these key questions: • What roles do school board and provincial policies play in school closure process? • How do these policies affect the pedagogical landscape? • What is the impact of school closures on their respective communities? • How do these educational governance methods compare to community planning policies? • Can school board objectives be reconciled with community planning objectives? These questions were addressed through qualitative surveys and interviews with School Board and Municipal officials and staff. The survey was completed with 39 responses across four communities in Southwest Ontario. The survey and interviews discovered a major gap in the knowledge of local officials pertaining to the comprehensive impact of school closures. In addition, responses spurred further investigation into the policies governing school boards including funding formula and public consultation guidelines. When asked, key respondents pointed to the lack of flexibility and the poor structure of the Province’s Education funding formula as the main challenge for providing educational facilities. In addition, the lack of collaboration between local municipalities and school boards in conjunction with the lack of cohesiveness in Provincial policy mandates from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs were found to ultimately compound the problems and the frustrations associated with the Accommodation Review process. Of the School Board officials surveyed and interviewed, very few saw the need for comprehensive collaboration with municipalities and local residents. However, nearly every planner surveyed or interviewed criticized this mindset as shortsighted and myopic. This paper found that for the provision of public goods, such as education policies, there is a need to provide flexibility for the local context. Municipalities must have a role to play in the process and must collaborate with local School Boards. In addition, the Accommodation Review process is limited by outdated funding policies from the Province and lacks the public empowerment that leads to creative decision-making with involvement of the electorate.

A major challenge facing communities across the Province of Ontario is the provision of educational facilities for students while balancing community-planning objectives. In recent years, it has become clear that Provincial and local policies coupled with demographic and financial pressures are leading to more closures and the loss of the public resources that are local schools. In the last three years, 172 schools have been slated for closure. In addition, public outcry has grown in volume as the Accommodation Review process is cited as an unsatisfying exercise for all those involved. From a planning perspective, schools are an irreplaceable resource in a community, yet current policy structures have left planners with no power to protect public assets while school boards are limited in the ability to find creative alternative solutions to closure. Therefore, to gain a broader understanding of the policies and processes governing Accommodation Reviews, this research was guided by these key questions: • What roles do school board and provincial policies play in school closure process? • How do these policies affect the pedagogical landscape? • What is the impact of school closures on their respective communities? • How do these educational governance methods compare to community planning policies? • Can school board objectives be reconciled with community planning objectives? These questions were addressed through qualitative surveys and interviews with School Board and Municipal officials and staff. The survey was completed with 39 responses across four communities in Southwest Ontario. The survey and interviews discovered a major gap in the knowledge of local officials pertaining to the comprehensive impact of school closures. In addition, responses spurred further investigation into the policies governing school boards including funding formula and public consultation guidelines. When asked, key respondents pointed to the lack of flexibility and the poor structure of the Province’s Education funding formula as the main challenge for providing educational facilities. In addition, the lack of collaboration between local municipalities and school boards in conjunction with the lack of cohesiveness in Provincial policy mandates from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs were found to ultimately compound the problems and the frustrations associated with the Accommodation Review process. Of the School Board officials surveyed and interviewed, very few saw the need for comprehensive collaboration with municipalities and local residents. However, nearly every planner surveyed or interviewed criticized this mindset as shortsighted and myopic. This paper found that for the provision of public goods, such as education policies, there is a need to provide flexibility for the local context. Municipalities must have a role to play in the process and must collaborate with local School Boards. In addition, the Accommodation Review process is limited by outdated funding policies from the Province and lacks the public empowerment that leads to creative decision-making with involvement of the electorate.

This is a historical study of the political process connected to closures and reorganizations of schools in the rural municipalities Stenbrohult, Göteryd and Virestad in Sweden during the years 1954-1970.The main source material used in the study are protocols from meetings with the city councils and the local education committees. Articles from the newspaper Smålänningen are used as a complement to the protocols. The study shows that all three of the municipalities went through big changes when it comes to education and schools during the period. The number of schools were reduced from 20 in 1954 to 7 in 1970. The main reasons that the schools were reorganized was that old school buildings were in bad condition, the number of students in rural areas were diminishing and small schools with only a few students were too expensive. Urbanization and centralization seem to have been important factors that contributed to the closing of many schools.

This study arose out of an experience with an amalgamation of two high schools in the ACT in the early 1990s. The amalgamation process took two and a half years from the time the decision was made to close one of the schools until the new school was consolidated on one site. The change processes impacted on many areas of teachers' work and this, combined with the emotional aspects of being in a school which was closing, flagged teacher morale as an issue requiring attention. The study involved seeking responses to a questionnaire and interviewing teachers involved in the amalgamation. The interview data was then grouped by issue and the responses from teachers analysed and compared with related research literature. Research indicated that leadership style and effectiveness impacts most heavily on the morale of teachers undergoing major change such as school closure/amalgamation. This was substantiated by this study. The decision, by the principal, to close both schools and create a new school, retaining aspects of the culture of the original schools was clearly favoured over the alternative suggestion, by the ACT Government, of the swift closure method and the absorption of students into an existing school. The outward signs of a new school; name; logo; uniform; the involvement of the community, the degree of shared decision-making, the refurbishment of the buildings, the new curriculum and associated policies and the management of resources were found to contribute positively to teacher morale. A lack of consultation prior to announcing the closure decision, a failure to acknowledge the need of some teachers to grieve for the loss of their school and a lack of activities to mark the final days of the schools involved have been identified as having the greatest negative effect on teacher morale in this study. Maintenance and effective use of the buildings vacated by a closing school has also been raised as an issue affecting the morale of the teachers from that school. This study has implications for future school closures or amalgamations from the points of view of maintaining of the morale of teachers, and also that of students

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The spread of Covid-19 led to social restrictions of various kinds, of which closing schools was one. This paper studies the effect of school closures on parental labor supply. To this end, I use repeated cross-sectional data on households at the monthly level from the US Current Population Survey (CPS), and employ a difference-in-differences methodology where I compare the labor market outcomes for parents to school-aged children that require supervision with parents to slightly older children, before and after March 2020. The results show that there is a significant reduction in the labor supply of parents to younger children as a result of school closures, and that the effects are larger for mothers than for fathers.

This paper studies how the school closures in Kenya as a result of the corona pandemic have affected students in Kenya depending on different socio-economic classes. In addition, the study examines how access to the internet, the gender of the student, access to education during the school closures and location of residence affected the return to school after the school closures in Kenya. In order to obtain results, the work is based on data from Covid-19 Rapid Response Phone survey made by The World Bank in collaboration with the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and the University of California. Furthermore, have pooled cross section regressions and cross section regressions been used. In addition, fixed effects for households have been included to measure how the children are affected differently excluding the social circumstances. The results that this paper presents are that factors influencing the returning rate in Kenya during the school closure were internet access, gender, availability of distance learning and place of residence. Surprisingly, girls were more likely to return to school, contrary to gender norms. Initially, access to education and the internet correlated positively with not returning to school, but later it had a negative impact, which may indicate that students with access to this delayed their return. In conclusion, socio-economic factors and access to the internet and distance learning played a significant role in influencing dropout rates in Kenya.

<p>The importance of citizen’s psychological need for community, amenities, and the feeling of equitable distribution of the varied impacts from urban change are gaining recognition as important factors in evaluating sustainable urban change. The inclusion of indicators that capture the equitable distribution of urban change impacts are a rare addition to the vast list of sustainability indicator sets available to researchers. Rarer still is the application of Integrated Urban Models (IUMs) and sustainability indicators in assessing the sustainability of land use and transportation policies which impact not only the form and structure of cities, but also the health and wellbeing of the city residents. Using three land use scenarios relevant to the study area: the City of Hamilton, scenarios which simulate alternative residential density patterns, the suburbanization of employment and the closure of elementary and secondary schools are projected into the medium term future using an integrated GIS-based model for simulating the consequences of demographic changes and population ageing on transportation (IMPACT), a sustainability indicator module and a set of indicators measuring the degree to which the urban change is just. The sustainability values generated from the use of IMPACT and SUSTAIN offer valuable insight to the literature related to each scenario. More importantly, the justice indicators add value information as to the impact of urban change on vulnerable population groups. The combination of IMPACT and SUSTAIN offers new avenue and method for future research on the sustainability of urban change.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

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I en tid där skolor stängs ner för gott som en strategi för att möta utmaningar som exempelvis segregation inom västerländska skoldistrikt är det värt att reflektera över hur de påverkar barn och deras välbefinnande. Bakgrunden till uppsatsen bygger på ett större projekt av Flensner &amp; Svensson (2023) kopplat till skolstängningar. I uppsatsen har projektets data från hösten 2021 använts. Metoden är kvantitativ och den upplevda känslan av trivsel, trygghet och tillit jämfördes mellan elever som bytt skola och de som inte bytt skola. Det var 1349 elever i åldrarna 10–15 år som deltog i undersökningen. Data från projektet analyserades med hjälp av Pearsons korrelationsanalys och ett oberoende t-test. Resultaten visade att trivsel, trygghet och tillit korrelerar positivt med varandra. Elever som svarade på enkäten och hade bytt skola trivdes i genomsnitt lika bra jämfört med de som inte hade bytt skola. Dessutom fanns en signifikant skillnad i upplevelsen av trygghet, där de som inte bytt skola kände sig tryggare. De som bytt skola upplevde en högre nivå av tillit. Eftersom många av de tillfrågade valde att inte svara skulle det kunna ha påverkat generaliserbarheten av resultatet. Diskussionen belyser skolstängningars effekt på elevernas upplevelse av trivsel, trygghet och tillit i skolan. / At a time when schools are being closed for good as a strategy to meet challenges such assegregation within Western school districts, it is worth reflecting on how they affect children and their well-being. The background to the essay is based on a larger project by Flensner &amp; Svensson (2023) linked to school closures. In the essay, the project's data from autumn 2021 has been used. The method is quantitative, and the perceived sense of well-being, security, and trust was compared between students who changed schools and those who did not. There were 1,349 students aged 10–15 who participated in the survey. Data from the project were analyzed using Pearson's correlation analysis and an independent t-test. The results showed that well-being, security, and trust correlate positively with each other. Pupils who responded to the survey and had changed schools were on average just as happy compared to those who had not changed schools. In addition, there was a significant difference in the security experience, where those who did not change schools felt safer. Those who changed schools experienced a higher level of trust. As many of the respondents chose not to answer, this could affect the generalizability of the results. The discussion highlights the effect of school closures on students' experience of well-being, security, and trust in school.