An imaginative joint effort by public and private interests revived the former Ridgefield High School (Connecticut) and transformed it into an executive office building. It will eventually revert to the town for another use. (Author/MLF)

In this age of declining enrollments, alternatives exist to boarding up schools that are no longer being fully utilized. This paper discusses such alternatives by describing the situation in a Minnesota school district. Of the four elementary school buildings closed in St. Louis Park in the past five years, one was sold to a developer, two are…

Details on how a surplus school was transformed into an office for the Marin County (California) Office of Education. (Author/MLF)

A survey of approximately 80 closed schools revealed the cause of closing the school, the new users' form of ownership, and the type of reuse. School districts should recognize the steps required to define a market in an attractive and financially feasible form. (Author/MLF)

An Atlanta, Georgia, school that closed after 50 years of service and stood vacant for five more years now contains subsidized rental apartments for the elderly. (MLF)

By the time today's surplus schools are needed for students, the buildings will be 40 or 50 years old. The surplus school should be disposed of now and new facilities built when the need arises. (MLF)

Some solutions to surplus space usage in school buildings. (MLF)

In 2000, the National Trust for Historic Preservation included neighborhood schools in its list of America's Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places, noting how many small neighborhood schools were closing. In rural areas, particularly, this may be caused by steadily declining enrollment that has forced districts to consolidate and close one, or…

The Samuel F. B. Morse School, built in 1874 and closed in 1980, is a historic landmark in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Now the building serves as low-income housing for 70 elderly tenants and is praised as being an imaginative and creative use of an old school structure. (MLF)

School districts with surplus space and those wishing to obtain space more economically than by constructing conventional additions will obtain insights from this collection of eight abstracts of references in the ERIC system. (MLF)

Describes a community planning laboratory process held to resolve the issue of reuse of excess school facilities. (Author/MLF)

The Surplus Schools Project was designed to stimulate and encourage the adaptive use and preservation of vacant school buildings in New York State. Through a statewide competition, the Preservation League selected four surplus schools that were located in four distinctly different communities and presented a broad range of problems and…

Rental of surplus school district property, arranged by a property management company, reduced the deficit of the properties for the Madison Metropolitan School District, Wisconsin. (MLF)