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Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis Claims Another Casualty: Its Schools

Camila Rivera during a math class at Dr. Hiram González School in Bayamón, P.R. The school will absorb about 190 students as part of a cost-saving consolidation.Credit...Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

AGUAS BUENAS, P.R. — Natalia Hernández stood before dawn with a bullhorn in her hand in front of the mountainside elementary school that four generations of her family attended, rattling off its academic accomplishments.

More than half the pupils are on the honor roll. There are tutors, a social worker and even a speech therapist, she said. But there has been an exodus of families from Puerto Rico in the face of its economic collapse, so little Luis Santaella School has a big problem: Only 146 children are enrolled compared with about 250 in the past.

And so, like 178 other schools across the island, it is set to close after the last day of the school term this week, in part to help Puerto Rico battle debt and pension obligations of $123 billion. The school, perched alongside a winding two-lane road 1,400 feet above sea level, will join the many casualties of a fiscal crisis that forced Puerto Rico to declare a form of bankruptcy last week and sent hundreds of thousands of people packing in the past decade.

The school will join the shuttered businesses and abandoned homes as yet another indicator of the emergency gripping Puerto Rico and the desperate efforts to stop the hemorrhaging. For some, the closings represent not just another chip at Puerto Rico’s national budget, but also an opportunity to transform a struggling education system in which some schools are infested with termites, enrollment has dropped by nearly a third since 2010, and just 10 percent of eighth graders passed the standardized math test.

But for parents like Ms. Hernández, the cuts feel both catastrophic and capricious.

“She closed this school without visiting it!” Ms. Hernández said, explaining the parents’ decision to park themselves at the school’s front gates to prevent teachers, students or the principal from going inside. Her son, Javian, 10, missed class all week.

By “she,” Ms. Hernández was referring to Julia Keleher, the Washington-based consultant who was recently named secretary of education in Puerto Rico. Ms. Keleher took control of the school system in January, a few months after Puerto Rico’s affairs were taken over by a governing board in New York.

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Natalia Hernández, left, protested with parents, teachers and students outside Luis Santaella School in Aguas Buenas, P.R., on Monday. The school, along with 178 others, is set to close as part of cost-cutting measures.Credit...Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

The oversight board has warned that the government must save up to $40 million a month, suggesting that about 300 schools close and that teachers be furloughed two days a month.

As a former federal education official with experience in Detroit and Washington, Ms. Keleher said, the concept of receivership is not foreign to her.

“We have to close schools,” Ms. Keleher said in an interview on Monday. “We are going to close schools.”

The plan Ms. Keleher announced is less draconian than the one the fiscal board had suggested. She insists that the consolidation — which many principals learned of as she announced it on television — is not just about saving money, but also about improving student performance and empowering local officials to be accountable for what happens at their schools.

She has covered her office’s long conference room table with spreadsheets. She whipped out a tablet with pie charts and bus routes as she laid out the possibilities she said would be opened when waste is eliminated. (She wrote her doctoral dissertation on data-driven decision-making.)

She said schools built for 800 students have just 300 enrolled. The district was still paying for water and power for abandoned school buildings. There are teacher shortages in some schools and surpluses in others. School facilities are rotting and infested with rats.

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Ángel Correa and Yesliany Ocasio, first graders at Dr. Hiram González School.Credit...Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

If two $1 million schools merge, Ms. Keleher said, the new $2 million school can afford computer labs that twice as many students could use.

“It has been a nearly impossible conversation,” she said. “This is not about closing schools. This is about creating these kinds of opportunities with this savings in budget.”

Aida Díaz, the president of a teachers’ union, says that while everyone recognizes some schools are in deplorable condition and others are underutilized, Ms. Keleher’s data-driven approach fails to consider nuances.

Looking at the list of closings, she noted that two schools whose communities were longtime rivals were being merged. Another school populated mostly by children who live in public housing was being merged with a school 10 minutes away by highway — but it is unlikely that their parents have cars.

Ms. Keleher said some schools did remain open for reasons just like those, including avoiding long commutes for children in rural areas. The list of closings dropped by five just since Friday.

“There is no sense in getting mad: Schools will have to close,” Ms. Díaz said. “There are schools that really are so obsolete, with good ones next to it with empty classrooms.”

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Lunch break at Dr. Hiram González School. A teachers’ union official said the data-driven approach to school consolidation had failed to consider nuances.Credit...Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

Emilio Nieves Torres, who heads a different teachers’ union, said government officials were misleading the public about the cuts. Although Ms. Keleher has vowed “not to fire anybody,” at least 5,000 teachers work on year-to-year contracts, and in order for the consolidation to result in real savings, thousands of contracts will not be renewed, he said.

Responding to the board’s demands, the government presented a fiscal plan that would freeze teacher salaries until 2021 — meaning that teachers, who earn about $21,000 a year and whose salaries have been frozen since 2008, would not get raises for 13 years, he said.

“Our biggest preoccupation is that all of this will be in the hands of a judge, named by the Supreme Court of the United States, and we don’t know if she’s going to take into account basic essentials of safety, health and education,” Mr. Nieves said. “Right now, that board has proposed cutting school two days a month. That’s a month of classes. That impacts education.”

On Friday, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. tapped Judge Laura Taylor Swain, of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, to preside over Puerto Rico’s filing for a form of bankruptcy relief from its many creditors.

For now, the savings is just $7 million in water and power bills. But Ms. Keleher acknowledged that many teacher contracts will not be renewed, and more cost savings will come when others quit in frustration.

“You’ll see a natural attrition with the kinds of changes we’re going to make,” she said. “I think people who are close to retirement will look at changes and say: ‘Do I want to do this? I’m not in my school anymore.’ Maybe they will choose to do something else.”

Ms. Keleher has a six-month contract for what she estimates to be an eight-year task.

“Everybody wanted something to change about public education in Puerto Rico,” she said, “up until we knocked on their door.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Fiscal Disaster in Puerto Rico Claims New Casualty: Schools. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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