In 2013, Chicago Public Schools closed 49 elementary schools, the largest mass public school closure in U.S. history at the time. A new study from researchers at the University of Chicago and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that, in addition to limiting access to education, the school closures also led to increases in gun violence.
Using data from the Chicago Police Department, the researchers showed that neighborhoods near a school saw a 9.9% increase in shootings in the years following its closure, compared to similar neighborhoods. These neighborhoods, mostly on the city's South and West sides, also experienced increases in weapons violations and firearm-related assaults and batteries.
While the city and school district said that the closed school buildings would be sold and repurposed as community centers, housing, or business ventures, 26 of the 49 buildings remained vacant as of 2023. Neighborhoods surrounding these long-vacant buildings saw slightly larger increases in shootings, at 10.2%.
"We wanted to look at the effects of these closures not just as creating vacant buildings, because schools represent so much more as a community institution across generations," said Thomas Statchen, a medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and lead author of the study, published recently in Social Science & Medicine .
"They are public spaces that are used for building community by hosting events after school and providing a gathering place," Statchen said. "When that is lost, it can impact the way neighborhoods function in ways that, as we saw in this study, could lead to increased rates of firearm violence."
Earlier this year, Statchen published a similar study in JAMA Network Open showing how increases in eviction rates in neighborhoods were associated with more shootings . That study drew from data collected by the Chicago Department of Public Health, showing that evictions disrupted the social cohesion and resilience of communities. Closing a school compounds this effect because of the vital role schools play in anchoring their neighborhoods.
"Closing a school is like evicting an entire community of social networks," said Elizabeth Tung, MD, MS , Associate Professor of Medicine at UChicago and a co-author of both studies. "You're taking a place that was so meaningful to a group of people, and now they're no longer able to congregate there and build their lives around it."
Because the Chicago school closings happened at the same time, they provided a unique opportunity to study the before-and-after effects on gun violence in the surrounding communities. The researchers used Chicago Police Department data from 2010 to 2019 to understand the trends in gun violence leading up to the school closings in 2013. After controlling for differences between neighborhoods where schools were closed and where they were not, researchers estimated how those trends would have continued had the schools remained open, compared with actual crime data in the years following 2013.
The 2013 school closures primarily affected low-income students of color, particularly Black students. Other studies have shown that the education of students displaced from their schools suffered in the short term. The researchers said that the new analysis shows how the decision to close schools impacts students and their communities far beyond access to education.
"When officials decide to close schools, they must ensure a concrete reuse plan is co-developed and co-implemented with residents from the start," said Mudia Uzzi, PhD, MSc , Bloomberg Assistant Professor of American Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and senior author of the new study.
"Most school closures happen in neighborhoods that are already under-resourced and long disenfranchised, so losing a school hits them twice as hard. Leaders have a responsibility to turn closed school buildings into spaces that strengthen community well-being, so every neighborhood has a fair chance to thrive," Uzzi said.
The study, " The 2013 Mass Public School Closure and Firearm Violence in Chicago: A Quasi-Experimental Difference-in-Differences Analysis ," was published June 3, 2026. Additional authors include Michael Desjardins, Elizabeth Wagner, and Odis Johnson Jr. from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
