A 2022 report from the Office of the Ombudsman of Puerto Rico details mismanagement of closed school buildings. 

By Katherine Dailey

Medill Reports

Documents with Social Security numbers and addresses scattered across rooms. Horses living in abandoned classrooms. Unofficial security guards standing watch outside locked buildings. 

This is the fate of scores of Puerto Rican schools, years after their closures by the island’s Department of Education. 

More than half of 401 schools closed across Puerto Rico in 2017 and 2018 were still in disuse after five years, and many of these vacant buildings are posing harm to the surrounding communities, according to a December 2022 report from Puerto Rico’s Ombudsman’s office. Though the report came out more than two years ago, it was not publicized or shared with relevant nonprofit organizations until earlier this year. 

At the time of the report, only 44% of closed schools had been transferred, leased or sold to a new owner — whether that be to a municipality, state agency, private owner or nonprofit group. 

The report provides a damning look at mismanagement of the closed and vacant school buildings, as well as the deeply harmful effects on surrounding communities. These results seen in the report were at times in direct opposition to the Puerto Rico Department of Education’s policies and the island’s laws about how the closures should have been handled administratively. 

Though many communities hoped former school buildings would become community centers to help their municipalities, that has become impossible due to the state of disrepair of many of the buildings. 

One area of mismanagement that remains unresolved, more than two years after the report’s release, is a lack of maintenance of the buildings. At least 172 schools suffered from a lack of maintenance, the report said.

“The Department of Education needs about between 5 and 10 million (dollars) per year to do the proper maintenance of those schools,” Ombudsman Edwin García Feliciano said. “But we think that the central government is assigning zero dollars to that still, and that affects the surrounding communities where the schools are located.” 

When the buildings are allowed to deteriorate in this way, it makes it much harder to eventually rehabilitate the buildings and turn them into usable structures, explained Alexis Acevedo Colon, an attorney at the Centro para la Reconstrucción del Hábitat (CRH), a nonprofit dedicated to abandoned buildings in Puerto Rico. 

According to Acevedo Colon, at schools that CRH has visited in recent months, there had been no grass maintenance or pest extermination. 

“They’re turning into public nuisances,” he said. 

Report’s findings

Not only are these buildings poorly maintained, these oversights are likely costing taxpayers thousands of dollars, according to Feliciano. 

At the time of the report, 25 vacant schools still had active water service and 13 had connected electricity service, with island taxpayers paying for the services. The Ombudsman’s report detailed how the Department of Education went against its own guidance and rules in this. 

An internal letter, or “Carta Circular,” from November 2015 explained that if a school closes, the site must be evaluated to determine whether the Department of Education can otherwise use the facilities. If it is deemed unusable, the structure should become state property under the Department of Transportation and Public Works. 

The letter also placed responsibility for ensuring the deactivation of utilities in the hands of the government.

Additionally, 20 schools were identified in the report as being used as illegal horse stables. Nine were identified as likely being occupied by squatters. Twenty-eight were identified as locations of potential criminal activity, based on factors like changed locks and private security presence at the buildings.

These circumstances present major health and safety risks to communities, increasing crime in communities and risks of injury from animals or the structures themselves. And no one seems to know who is responsible for the buildings. 

“When you ask the government who’s supposed to take care of this, four agencies pop up. Four. And each and every one of them, they don’t know who’s responsible for it,” Acevedo Colon said, echoing a sentiment shared by Feliciano. 

Those agencies are Puerto Rico’s Department of Education, Department of Transportation, Administration of Public Buildings, and Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority. 

In 2022, the report detailed, 28 schools, in the Mayagüez, Arecibo and Caguas educational regions, had documents with sensitive personal information — including addresses and Social Security numbers of students and staff — unsecured on the property. In 65 vacant schools, public property, such as books, desks and computers purchased by the government, were left abandoned. 

In most cases, according to the report, this meant none of the property could be reused in schools that remained open or in offices of other government agencies.

Within a month of the report’s release, the Department of Education resolved the issue of unsecured personal information, according to Feliciano. 

Despite improvements being made in some areas, the Ombudsman’s office has essentially no power to enforce their recommendations; under current law, they have no power to fine state agencies, Feliciano said. 

As Feliciano sees it, this must change if issues like vacant school buildings will be mitigated. 

“There are two alternatives,” he said. “One, if we have the power to, fine. Two, that the governor reduce the budget of those agencies that do not comply well with our recommendations.”

Threats to the Community

While the report from the Ombudsman’s office provided a crucial look into the physical conditions of vacant buildings, the school closures have harmed the communities that lost not only educational facilities but also potential community centers that could house childcare programs, advocacy groups, or support for elderly residents. 

Maricruz Rivera Clemente, the director of Corporación Piñones Se Integra (COPI), a community nonprofit that hosts educational and cultural events, described the loss of the only school in the northern coastal town of Piñones as detrimental to the neighborhood’s identity. After the school closed, some students were sent to schools in San Juan to the east, while others traveled to Loíza just west of the neighborhood. 

“Piñoneros are Piñoneros,” Rivera Clemente said, noting that going to school outside Piñones made it more difficult for students to connect with their home neighborhood. 

On top of increased travel distances and the fracturing of neighborhood communities, for groups like COPI, the loss of that school meant it was significantly more difficult to conduct outreach to the whole neighborhood. 

“(The school) was a connection for the community,” Rivera Clemente said, and when organizations needed to spread the word about an event or initiative, they would often rely on the school as a place to disseminate information. 

Cheguan Cora, a former mathematics teacher in Guayama on the south coast of the island, also noted a lack of specialized educational opportunities — whether that be special education for students with different educational needs or classes with a focus on the humanities. The loss of these programs in public schools has led to a “caste system,” where only those who can afford private school have access to these things. 

As schools have closed, he said, these problems only get worse. 

“This is what is happening in Puerto Rico – the school closes, they don’t have jobs, opportunities, and young people end up leaving the island,” Cora said in Spanish. 

School closures in context 

Puerto Rico’s Department of Education closed 470 schools between 2011 and 2021, according to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. By 2022, almost half of the public schools open in 2011 had been closed or privatized, and the closures disproportionately impacted students in more rural parts of the island.

One argument in favor of closing schools is a shrinking population, especially among young people, across Puerto Rico.

According to the International Monetary Fund, the whole island population has dropped by around 500,000 people since 2011. But while the population changes are real, some advocates have argued this does not negate the need for the buildings to be a part of their communities. 

“The demographic reality is that in Puerto Rico, people are getting older,” Acevedo Colon said. 

He also said school buildings could instead be used to provide services to elderly residents of a neighborhood if there were not enough school-aged children to justify reopening a school. 

Another primary argument for school closures was the significant debt owed by the island, which could be ideally lowered by selling buildings.

A September 2020 report by the Committee for the Evaluation and Disposition of Real Estate in the Puerto Rico Government showed 40 schools sold for a total of over $18 million, and about 78 schools were listed as being leased. 

The sales in the report represent barely half a percent of the island’s debt obligations, which currently stand at around $31 billion, according to the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico. 

The sale process right now prioritizes government ownership over buildings. 

“They have to offer (schools) first to the (island-wide) government, then to the municipality and then it goes to the public sectors,” said Nilsa Vasquez, a specialized attorney at the Ombudsman’s office. 

The Ombudsman’s office is skeptical about the overarching ability of municipalities and nonprofit organizations to fund the revitalization of these buildings. 

Feliciano, who was mayor of Camuy for 18 years, said other mayors have often taken on buildings their municipality can’t afford to maintain. 

“If I don’t have the budget to deal with the school, I don’t need a property, if I can’t develop that property,” Feliciano said. “But there are other mayors that want all the properties they can have — two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 — but they don’t have the budget. And if we take in consideration that we are in bankruptcy, then you have to be very careful with that type of decision.”

When nonprofits are given closed school buildings, Feliciano said they may face the same pitfalls, as they typically must ask governmental agencies for money.

To better understand the impacts of public versus private ownership of these buildings, Feliciano and his team are working on another investigation into what has happened to school buildings compared with what was proposed when they were bought. 

Community centers: Success stories

Some school buildings that have been purchased by nonprofits have turned into successful community centers that are providing crucial services to their neighborhoods in San Juan and Loíza. 

In Santurce, a neighborhood in San Juan, after the historic Pedro G. Goyco school was closed in 2015, community members took action to clean up the building themselves. 

Now, various neighborhood groups host arts and cultural events in the space, as well as a mental health clinic for neighborhood residents. 

And in Loíza, in the building that once housed Escuela Goyín Lanzó, La Junta Comunitaria de Parcelas Suárez now provides a whole host of services to the community, including Head Start early education classes for children. The center is also home to environmental advocacy against erosion on the local beaches.

But gaining access to that space was difficult, according to Alexis Correa Allende, a leader at the community center. 

“The process was very long, tedious,” he said in Spanish. “We had to fight very hard so that the government could not transfer it, but we achieved it. We have had the structure for 12 years now.”  

The process that Correa Allende referenced was not just long, it was a fight to remain. Residents of the neighborhood, Correa Allende included, occupied the closed school building, leading to a nighttime standoff with police. Their occupation led to negotiations with public officials, and eventually they were able to claim the building and reopen it as a community center. 

While many buildings remain vacant, advocates like Acevedo Colon continue to work around Puerto Rico to fight for the structures to become useful within communities. 

“We keep working our communities, talking to them about what they can do, what they cannot do,” he said. “Public pressure is what works.”

Katherine Dailey is a graduate student at Medill. She is a member of the Medill Investigative Lab and pursuing a concentration in data reporting. You can follow her on Twitter at @kmdailey7.